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THE TEN COMMANDMENTS 



THE 

TEN COMMANDMENTS 

WITH 

A CHRISTIAN APPLICATION 
TO PRESENT CONDITIONS 



BY 

HENRY SLOANE COFFIN 

M 

MINISTER IN THE MADISON AVENUE PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH, AND ASSOCIATE 
PROFESSOR IN THE UNION THEOLOGICAL SEMINARY, NEW YORK CITY 

Omnia consummationis vidifinem; latum mandatum tuum nimis. 

Psalm, cxviii (119) : 96 Vulgate 




HODDER & STOUGHTON 
NEW YORK 
GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY 



.C53 



Copyright, 1915, 
Bt George H. Doban Company 



SEP 251915 



©CI.A410651 



TO 

EDWARD S. HARKNESS 

Non est vera amicitia, nisi cum earn Tu agglutinas inter in- 
hoerentes Tibi. 

Augustine, Conf. 4:iv. 



PREFACE 

The outbreak of the Great War in the sum- 
mer of 1914 seemed to many to set us abruptly 
in the midst of another age. We had come to 
think of ourselves as living in an earth which, 
with all its selfishness, was slowly but surely 
responding to the touch of the Spirit of Christ. 
Americans looked upon the huge armaments of 
Europe as absurd anachronisms; the growth 
of intelligence and the spread of Christian 
ideals had made a conflict between the great 
powers unthinkable. We were startled and 
appalled to find ourselves suddenly thrust back 
into a day of pagan horrors. The folly of the 
strife bewildered us: whither had wisdom 
flown ? Its iniquity filled us with loathing : had 
righteousness been overthrown? We were 
driven to ask ourselves afresh what was wis- 
dom and what was righteousness. The moral 
bases of life were re-examined; the primary 
ethical ideals of Christianity were scanned with 
a new interest. We were ready to sit at Christ's 
feet and learn of Him, and to go with Him 

7 



8 



PREFACE 



to the wisdom He commended in "them of old 
time." A restatement of the Ten Command- 
ments seemed timely; their application an ur- 
gent necessity. 

The following sermons were preached in the 
autumn and winter of 1914-1915. They were 
printed in pamphlet form at the request of 
those who heard them, and found a rapid dis- 
tribution ; they are now given to a wider pub- 
lic in the hope that they may lead to a more 
eager and resolute search after the Kingdom 
of God and His righteousness. 

July, 1915. 



CONTENTS 

The First Commandment 

PAGE 

"Thou Shalt Have No Other Gods Before Me" . 11 

The Second Commandment 

"Thou Shalt Not Make Unto Thee a Graven 

Image" 31 

The Third Commandment 

"Thou Shalt Not Take the Name of the Lord, Thy 

God, in Vain" 51 

The Fourth Commandment 
"Remember the Sabbath Day to Keep It Holy" . 71 

The Fifth Commandment 
"Honour Thy Father and Thy Mother" . . .91 

The Sixth Commandment 
"Thou Shalt Not Kill" . , . . . . .111 

The Seventh Commandment 
"Thou Shalt Not Commit Adultery" . . . .131 

The Eighth Commandment 

"Thou Shalt Not Steal" 153 

9 



10 CONTENTS 

The Ninth Commandment 

PAGE 

"Thou Shalt Not Bear False Witness Against Thy 

Neighbour" 177 

The Tenth Commandment 

"Thou Shalt Not Covet Anything That Is Thy 

Neighbour's" 197 



THE FIRST COMMANDMENT 



THE TEN COMMANDMENTS 



THE FIRST COMMANDMENT 

Exodus xx:3: "Thou shalt have no other gods before 
Me." 

Were this commandment to be phrased to- 
day, it might read: "Thou shalt have at least / 
one God." Our danger apparently lies not in 
worshipping too many deities, but in worship- 1 
ping none at all. There are numbers of men 
and women who seem to look up to nothing. 
Instead of praying, they plan; instead of as- 
piring to a perfection on high, they cherish 
their own ideals ; instead of trusting with child- 
like dependence to a Power outside themselves, 
they resolutely push their own way ; instead of 
opening their spirits to intercourse with An- 
other, they think hard ; instead of casting their 
burden upon Him, they throw it over their 
own shoulders. In a brilliant essay, Sainte 
Beuve pictures the great preacher, Bossuet, as 
seeking "something that may awaken in the 

13 



14 THE TEN COMMANDMENTS 

human heart that terrible thought of seeing 
nothing above itself." The difficulty with 
many people is not in finding some rock that 
is higher than they, to which to lead them; 
but to induce them to raise their eyes to any 
point on the rock loftier than themselves. Cer- 
tain minds have a fatal faculty for reducing 
everything and every one to their own level. 
They are incapable of seeing in men vastly 
better than themselves the virtues in which 
these excel them; but they quickly detect the 
faults akin to their own. Firm in their com- 
placency, they look out on the world with eyes 
slightly downcast, prepared to find all objects 
in their field of vision beneath them. And 
whatever is above remains out of their sight. 
The only hope for them is that some circum- 
stance will lay them flat on their backs in ut- 
ter helplessness, and compel them to look up ; 
then, perhaps, a new world will swim within 
their ken, the world of things high and lofty, 
the mountain-tops and the stars and the over- 
arching sky, — the age-old symbols of Gfod. 

Most men are fortunately not quite so self- 
assured and self-satisfied. They look out and 
up; and awesome sights greet their eyes. 



m 



THE FIRST COMMANDMENT 15 



"There are moments," says Victor Hugo, 
"when, whatever the attitude of the body, the 
soul is on its knees." Truth commands their 
loyalty; justice enlists their conscience; beauty 
captivates their spirits; love masters their 
hearts. They discover what it is to surrender 
themselves to the lordship of something they 
cannot but obey. In that experience, whether 
or not they call the object of their devotion 

"God," religion is born. ' 

"What means it," asks Martin Luther, "to 
have a God?" and replies, "Whatever thy 
heart clings to and relies upon, that is proper- 
ly thy God." And it is just here that we mod- 
erns find o urselves in peril of the old poly- 
theism Against, ^hi ch this First Comm andment 
jsj^sgtonii warning. Not to speak of the 
common idolatry of trust in people, — such 
idolatry as Luther himself once acknowledged 
when he said, " I expect more goodness from 
Kate, my wife, and PlmTp^Ielancthon^~an d 
from my other f riends, than from my sweet 
and blessed Saviour." — or of the crude trust 
in dollars, we are polytheists in this, that we 
rely upon different things in different circum- 
stances, or in different spheres of our life; so 



16 THE TEN COMMANDMENTS 



that unconsciously we bring back under other 
names, or rather unnamed, the many deities 
of the heathen credulity. 

Many of us, for instance, have one god for -j 
the hearth and another for the market-place. 
We confide our homes to love. We trust 
wife or husband utterly, because love binds 
them to us. We expect parents and children 
to fulfil their duties to one another, to hold 
fast to each other through all the years their 
lives are spared, because this household deity, 
affection, can be depended on. And we wor- 
ship the domestic god with appropriate rites. 
He has his sacraments of the kiss and the 
remembered personal festivals. He has his 
ten commandments, — ten reduced to one, for 
love is the fulfilling of his law. And he pos- 
sesses our whole-hearted allegiance ; what love 
cannot do with wife or husband, nothing else 
can accomplish; when love fails with children 
or with parents, there is naught stronger or 
wiser to fall back upon. And love proves itself 
trustworthy; it seeketh not its own, is not 
provoked, taketh not account of evil, beareth 
all things, believeth all things, hopeth all 
things, endureth all things, and never faileth. 



THE FIRST COMMANDMENT 17 



But when we close the door of our home and 
go out into the world of business, we seem to 
have passed into a realm where some other 
divinity bears sway. Instead of looking with 
trust at those with whom we trade, we eye 
them sharply. Instead of depending upon 
mutual affection to keep us and those with 
whom we have dealings faithful to our obliga- 
tions, we rely on self-interest. Men will do 
business with us and we with them, so long as 
it is profitable, and no longer. The tie which 
unites lives in this sphere is ^dfi^lmcssj_so long 
as men's interests he in the same direction, 
they pull together; the instant their interests 
clash, they pull apart. And this god of the 
market-place, too, has his appropriateritgs^ 
hTs revered highpriests are the financially 
powerful; his sacraments are business con- 
tracts, enforceable by the strong hand of law ; 
his ten commandments are the so-called "rules 
of the game," and they rest on the assumption 
that every man is for himself first, last and 
always. The god of the hearth is love; the 
god of the market-place is self-interest. Fam- 
ily is family, business is business; and the an- 
cient polytheism is with us still. 



18 THE TEN COMMANDMENTS 



Or we have one god for the individual and ^ 
/ another for society. The divinity of the in- 
dividual is forgiving and redeeming, and his 
devotee must also forgive and try to redeem 

those who injure him. When we are wronged, 

we feel that our first duty is to rid our hearts 
of illwill and vindictiveness ; and our next 
duty is to do all in our power for the man 
who has wronged us, that we may help him 
never to wrong another again. Our private 
deity requires us to love our enemies and do 
them good. We dare not ask him to pardon 
our sins, save as we pray, "Forgive us our 
debts as we forgive our debtors." But the god 
* of society is apparently a different being. 
When a man wrongs the community by com- 
mitting a crime, the first duty of the commun- 
ity, in the name of its god, is to protect itself 
and imprison the offender. Its next is to try 
to pay him back for the harm he has done, 
apportioning a penalty to fit his offence: so 
many years for grand larceny, so many months 
for petty larceny; imprisonment for murder 
in the second degree, death for murder in the 
first. The god of forgiveness and redemption 
seemingly has no jurisdiction in the social 



THE FIRST COMMANDMENT 19 



treatment of wrong, unless it be for very young 
or trivial offenders, whom we deal with by the 
probation system. * 
The deity of the individual is a god of jus- j 
tice. If some one injures him, he does not 
feel that he can give way to his resentment and 
attack the aggressor with knife or pistol, or 
proceed to take part of his possessions from 
him. He must carry his grievance to a duly 
constituted court, where it will be impartially 
heard; and he must abide by the decision of 
that court, whether his feelings are satisfied 
by its verdict or not. But the deity of a na- | 
tion seems not to be this god of justice, but a I 
god of force. If a nation is wronged, unless I 
the wrong is of the most trifling kind, it re- 
fuses to have it tried by a tribunal. Its na- 
tional honour justifies it in resorting to arms, 
and, if possible, compelling its assailant to cede 
it territory, or pay it an indemnity, or lose its 
independence altogether. 

Or again, the god of one group or class 
often does not seem to them to be the god 
of some other group. A nation going to war 
asserts that its god and the god of its fathers 
will assure it victory, as though its enemies 



20 THE TEN COMMANDMENTS 



and their fathers were under the protection 
of some lesser deity. A group of wealthy- 
people will speak of the god who sanctions the 
ownership of property, and solemnly warns 
"Thou shalt not steal," when radical legislation 
threatens to take something from them, or 
strikers offer violence to their belongings ; but 
they apparently think that some other deity 
sanctions the right of the labourer to his job 
and to a living wage. On the other hand, a 
group of working men will insist that the god 
of justice and of the future approves of their 
violent methods of obtaining their demands; 
and speak as if all his sympathy and tender- 
ness were with them, while the capitalists 
against whom they are striving are under some 
outworn pagan god of property — a god of the 
past. 

On every hand we find ourselves living not 
under one God, but under many. Whatever 
may be our nominal religion, we are practically 
polytheists, and as really polytheists as the 
I crude savages who people the world with mul- 
titudes of discordant spirits. Our gods clash: 
the god*of the hearth with the god of the shop; 
the god of persons with the god of nations; 



THE FIRST COMMANDMENT 21 



the god of Russians with the god of Germans ; 
the god of property with the god of humanity. 
There is as much war among our deities as 
among the quarrelling Olympians of Homer, 
or the contending divinities of Ammon and 
Moab, of Philistia and Judah. 

The baneful result of many gods is to rob 
life of its ugjty« We are not whole men with 
natures all of one piece, but ' 'things of shreds 
and patches," crazy-quilt natures, mixtures of 
half a dozen species of Dr. Jekyll with as 
many varieties of Mr. Hyde. His wife and 
children know one Zacchaeus — kindly, genial, 
devoted ; those who do business with the farmer 
of taxes in the city of Jericho are familiar 
with quite another Zacchaeus — shrewd, grasp- 
ing, hard. His personal friends know one 
Zacchaeus; the community which considers 
him a social outcast knows another. That on 
which he depends, his god, in these different 
relations, makes him now this, now that, now 
something else — a composite Zacchaeus. Eli 
and young Saul and David know and dearly 
love one Samuel; Agag and the Philistines 
know a very different Samuel. This devout 
prophet thought he believed in one God; but 



22 THE TEN COMMANDMENTS 



he did not yet know that the God of Israel 
was also the God of Philistia, so he devoutly 
hewed Agag in pieces before Jehovah in Gil- 
gal. The deity on whom we rely and after 
whom we fashion ourselves in our relations 
with our friends — the deity of respect and 
sympathy and willing service — is seldom the 
deity on whom we depend and whom we imi- 
tate in our office, or as patriots when we think 
of our country's relation with Mexico or 
Japan. Many gods make us many unlike' 
men in one disunited and discordant person- 
ality. Our name is legion, for we are many. 

No doubt most of us have taken for granted 
that if there be a God at all, there cannot be 
more than one. We may have felt ourselves 
tempted to atheism or to agnosticism, but 
hardly to polytheism. But is the belief in one 
God we have inherited from Israel really a 
truer explanation of the facts of life than the 
belief in gods many, which was held by peo- 
ples so intelligent as Greeks and Romans? 

For example, is it clear that the God of our 
hearts is also the God of nature? There is 
nothing about which we feel more intensely 
than the distinction between right and wrong; 



THE FIRST COMMANDMENT 23 



right we must love and wrong we must hate; 
but nature seems to have nothing akin to our 
consciences. 

In Thomas Hardy's tragic novel, Tess of 
the D'Urbervilles, after his heroine's moral 
downfall, he concludes a chapter with this pic- 
ture: "Walking among the sleeping birds in 
the hedges, watching the skipping rabbits on a 
moonlit warren, or standing under a pheasant- 
laden bough, she looked upon herself as a fig- 
ure of Guilt intruding into the haunts of In- 
nocence. But all the while she was making a 
distinction where there was no difference. 
Feeling herself in antagonism, she was quite 
in accord. She had been made to break an 
accepted social law, but no law known to the 
environment in which she fancied herself such 
an anomaly." Was the God of her conscience, 
as Hardy appears to think, a moral hobgob- 
lin by which she was terrified without reason? 
Is the God of conscience a small private di- 
vinity, while some great conscienceless Force 
dominates the world outside? Or is the whole 
structure and fabric of the universe shot 
through wTtF righteousness ? 

Again,^Se~we~convinced that the God of 



24 THE TEN COMMANDMENTS 



our homes, to whom we give the family name, 
"Our Father," is the Deity actually in control 
of the commercial affairs and the international 
contacts of men? Could He successfully con- 
duct them, if we would let Him? Can the 
same Spirit, upon which we rely in our house- 
holds, be confided in to direct aright these 
other spheres? Will Love work practically, 
and prove itself the dominant might in every 
part of this and of all other worlds? 

The religious experience of mankind has 
certainly been against polytheism. Even in 
Greece and Rome, the more thoughtfully de- 
vout came to feel their way past the many 
gods to a mysterious One. Israel was led to 
discover that its Jehovah was no private Pro- 
tector of its twelve tribes — 

"A god they pitted 'gainst a swarm 
Of neighbour gods less vast of arm" — 

but the Lord of the whole earth. Believing 
souls discover that they can no more have 
several gods than several wives. One God, 
if they really come into fellowship with Him, 
claims them for Himself alone, and is jealous 
with love's jealousy. And He succeeds in so 



THE FIRST COMMANDMENT 25 



completely engrossing their every capacity, 
that they have no unused remainders to devote 
to other divinities. 

In William Morris' Sir Galahad, the 
knight is represented in an irreligious mood, 
"with no touch of awe upon him," when he is 
attracted by the ringing of a bell, and finds 
himself entering a chapel, where he sees, 

"One sitting on the altar as a throne, 

Whose face no man could say he did not know." 

Instinctively Sir Galahad kneels, 
"for he felt 

The first time what a thing was perfect dread." 

When God makes His own divine impres- 
sion upon us in Jesus Christ, we experience 
such a perfect and complete abasement — our 
minds mastered by One who grips them as 
the final Truth, our consciences held by One 
who is to them their ideal of Right, our admi- 
ration called out by One who seems the alto- 
gether Lovely, our hearts kindled by One who 
sets them all aflame with love — our whole 
self goes out in such response to Him, that 
we have nothing left to give to another. 

This old commandment did not read "There 



26 THE TEN COMMANDMENTS 



is but one God." People might argue that 
proposition endlessly. It read: "Thou shalt 
have no other gods before Me." In having, 
in trusting this God, we find Him engrossing 
all the capacity for the Divine within us. We 
find as a matter of experience that we cannot 
trust God in Christ, without His drawing us 
to trust Him altogether. We are forced either 
to give Him our all, or nothing. We cannot 
serve Him with a fraction of ourselves; it 
requires as much as in us is to obey Him ; and 
when He answers our obedience with His 
comradeship, He fills our every need and more. 
If Martin Luther is correct "that to have a 
God means to have something in which the 
heart puts all its trust," Jesus of Nazareth 
has the power to capture our entire trust, 
and to be the God who has us. We give Him 
our adoration, our confidence, our loyalty, and 
not a part but the whole of our soul's 
devotion. 

But to worship Jesus as God seems to some 
minds to break this First Commandment: 
"Thou shalt have no other gods before 
Me." There is a common form of stating 
the deity of Christ which leaves the Christian 



THE FIRST COMMANDMENT 27 



with at least two gods — the Creator of the 
Universe and the Jesus of history. But that 
on which we rely and which we worship in 
the Father and the Son is the same divinity, 
is Christlike love. It is that which bows 
us in adoration before Jesus, when He stands 
at our side, a Man in all points like ourselves ; 
it is that which we adore with Him in His 
God and Father, the Lord of heaven and 
earth. For us, as for Paul, "There is one 
God, the Father, of whom are all things, and 
we unto Him; and one Lord, Jesus Christ, 
through whom are all things and we through 
Him." We follow Jesus in placing the trust 
of our hearts utterly in One who is love, and 
we find that love made plain and embodied in 
the Jesus we follow. When we adore Jesus, 
we worship God in Him; when we pray to 
Jesus, we pray to God through Him. There 
is for us one God, and He is manifest to us 
fully in Christ. 

And how all important it is that, having 
been mastered by the true God, we should 
come back to this first principle that we can 
have no other god beside. The only hope of 
lasting peace on earth is that all nations shall 



28 THE TEN COMMANDMENTS 



so rely on Christlike love that they will allow 
nothing else to control their public policies. 
The only solution of our industrial conflicts 
is that all who have any part in the world's 
work, — investors, managers, working men and 
women — shall really believe in the Godship 
of Christlike love, and let this God lead them 
into His economic order of brotherly striving 
for the common enrichment of the whole 
household of His children. The only prospect 
of our becoming complete selves, whole men 
and women, lies in our loving this God with 
all our heart, all our soul, all our mind, all 
our strength, so that no fractions of our per- 
sonalities pass out under the sway of other 
and alien ideals. 

We said that God in Christ has the ability 
to claim and engross our all. That is true, 
provided we are willing to put our all into 
"the life He is willing to share with us. Hus- 
7 band and wife can occupy each other's entire 
/ hearts; and they do, if each puts a whole self 
into their common life. But many married 
/ couples have very imperfectly shared interests ; 
and in the unshared interest lies the peril of 
infidelity. Have we a purpose with which 




THE FIRST COMMANDMENT 29 



God in Christ cannot sympathise? Has He 
a purpose into which we are not cordially 
entering? Look at Him, and keep looking at 
Him, as He opens His mind and heart to us 
in the life and cross of His Son, and is there 
not a love there for all mankind and for our- 
selves, which "demands our soul, our life, our 
all"? 



THE SECOND COMMANDMENT 



THE SECOND COMMANDMENT 



Exodus xx:4: "Thou shalt not make unto thee a 
graven image/' 

This is a commandment for which we can 
easily discover a temporary justification. In 
the age of Moses and of Israel's great proph- 
ets, in a world full of image-worshippers, it 
is difficult to see how the spirituality of God 
could have been safeguarded except by a dras- 
tic prohibition against any likeness of any- 
thing in heaven, or earth, or sea. Pictorial art 
vastly enriches life; but if one must sacrifice 
either spiritual religion or sculpture and paint- 
ing, there can be no question which is the more 
valuable to retain. As it is better for a man 
to forego the development of his nature alto- 
gether on some lines, rather than imperil his 
moral health; better for him (in Christ's 
words) "to enter into life maimed," rather 
than having two eyes and two hands to be 
wrecked in character; so it is better that life 
should be artistically impoverished than re- 
ligiously degraded. 

33 



34 THE TEN COMMANDMENTS 

But in our age is this commandment needed? 
And in what sense? It is a sweeping prohi- 
bition of all painting and sculpture whatso- 
ever ; and many earnest Christians at different 
ages in the history of the Church have fol- 
lowed it, and have looked askance at devotees 
of art. Those who delighted most in beauty 
of form and colour have often slighted the 
beauty of holiness; and in protest those to 
whom righteousness has been the supreme end 
in life have looked with suspicion on the cult 
of loveliness. Some exceedingly conscientious 
and earnest epochs have been hideous; and 
on the other hand some of the most artistic 
periods in the world's history have been both 
immoral and undevout. There is a sincere 
confession in a sonnet which Michael Angelo 
wrote in his old age: — 

Now hath my life across a stormy sea, 

Like a frail bark, reached that wide port where all 

Are bidden, ere the final reckoning fall 

Of good and evil for eternity. 

Now know I well how that fond phantasy 

Which made my soul the worshipper and thrall 

Of earthly art is vain; how criminal 

Is that which all men seek unwillingly. 

Those amorous thoughts which were so lightly dressed, 



THE SECOND COMMANDMENT 35 



What are they when the double death is nigh? 
The one I know for sure, the other dread. 
Painting nor sculpture now can lull to rest 
My soul, that turns to His great love on high, 
Whose arms to clasp us on the cross were spread. 

Art, made life's chief purpose, starves the 
soul ; but to condemn art altogether is to starve 
another side of our nature. Thackeray has 
more than one bitter thrust at the current 
evangelical religion dominant in Britain and 
this country a generation ago because of its 
contentment with ugliness and its fear of aught 
which charmed with its beauty. He makes 
Major Dobbin say in Vanity Fair, "that for 
his part, every beauty of art and nature made 
him thankful as well as happy, and that the 
pleasure to be had in listening to fine music, 
as in looking at the stars in the sky or at a 
beautiful landscape or picture, was a benefit 
for which we might thank heaven as sincerely 
as for any other worldly blessing." To which 
Amelia utters some feeble objections based 
on the current religious ideas of the day. 

We have moved a long way since then, and 
are happily more Christian. Our Lord's own 
keen appreciation of lovely sights and His 



36 THE TEN COMMANDMENTS 



incomparable artistic skill in the one medium 
available to Him — language — must make us 
sympathetic with all who render life richer 
by chisel or brush. We cannot forget that all 
things fair are as truly reflections of God as 
all things true and just; that God is Right- 
eousness and Truth and 

"that Beauty 
Which penetrates and clasps and fills the world." 

We do not rightly worship Him with holi- 
ness alone, but in the beauty of holiness. 

But granting that this commandment was 
far too sweeping, what shall we say of its nar- 
rower application to pictorial ^^presentations 
of Deity? William Blake once remarked: 
"There are three powers in man of conversing 
with Paradise — Poetry, Painting and Music." 
If we are to have intercourse with the 
Unhearable, the Unseeable, the Unf eelable, we 
must find some ways of intercommunication. 
If our spirits are to carry on commerce with 
God, we must discover means of transit by 
which He may send what He wills to us, 
and we what we wish to Him. Poetry, the 
making of thought-images, is one method. 



THE SECOND COMMANDMENT 37 



And the Bible is throughout poetic in this 
sense that it employs picturesque words to 
make us see God. He is a Rock, a Shield, a 
Sun, a High Tower, a Home. Music, which, 
as Tiecke put it, "teaches us to feel feeling," 
is another method of setting us in contact 
with God. The Bible's prose is musical, and 
its rhythm affects us, as well as its imagery 
of thought; its poetical passages, while they 
are not rhymed, are marvellously musical, and 
lend themselves easily to use with voice and 
instrument, as in chants and anthems. Both 
poetry and music were freely enlisted by the 
Hebrews in the service of their faith. Why 
was it that they barred sculpture and painting? 

A graven image, even to the crudest wor- 
shipper, is probably very seldom identified 
with his god; it is only a symbol of his god. 
There is a peril that the god and the symbol 
shall be confused ;Hburit^~a~ _ peTi^ 
which Jesiis" took" in" iristitut ing" the Lord's 
Supper. Why should it be thought so much 
more dangerous to paint on canvas or carve 
a representation of Divinity than to draw 
a thought of God on the wall of the mind or 
grave an image of Him in the intellect? The 



38 THE TEN COMMANDMENTS 



Christian Church very early discarded this 
Jewish commandment; there are rough draw- 
ings in the catacombs, and Christian artists of 
the most saintly and devout characters — a Fra 
Angelico for example — dedicated their lives 
to imaging the Divine. The chief artistic 
treasures of the Christian centuries are paint- 
ings which try to portray Biblical scenes or 
persons — Christ, the Virgin Mother, even God 
the Father. But from time to time there have 
been vigorous protests from spiritually minded 
men who have felt that these pictorial rep- 
resentations were an injury to real religion. 
One thinks of the Iconoclasts in Byzantium, 
the early Protestants who smashed the carved 
figures on the cathedrals of France and Hol- 
land, the Puritans who destroyed stained glass 
windows, reduced the architecture of their 
churches to the most baldly simple lines, 
and could not abide sacred painting or sculp- 
ture. Were they right? 

J^n-A^Mm^ton^ymonds, the historian of 
The R^n^^^£j^Italt/ , will certainly not be 
discounted as one who lacked artistic appre- 
ciation; but in his volume on The Fine Arts, 
he ranges himself entirely on the side of the 

/ 



THE SECOND COMMANDMENT 39 



Iconoclasts. "The spirit of Christianity and 
the spirit of figurative art are opposed, not 
because such art is immoral, but because it 
cannot free itself from sensuous associations* 
When the worshipper would fain ascend on 
wings of ecstasy to God, the infinite, ineffable, 
unrealised, how can he endure the contact of 
these splendid forms, in which the lust of the 
eye and the pride of life, professing to sub- 
serve devotion, remind him rudely of sensuous 
existence? Religion has its proper end in 
contemplation and in conduct. Art aims at 
presenting sensuous embodiment of thoughts 
and feelings with a view to intellectual en- 
joyment. There are many feelings which can- 
not properly assume a sensuous form; and 
these are precisely religious feelings, in which 
the soul abandons sense, and leaves the actual 
world behind, to seek her freedom in a 
spiritual region. As meteors become luminous 
by traversing the grosser element of our ter- 
restrial atmosphere, so the thoughts that art 
employs must immerse themselves in sensuous- 
ness. Our deepest thoughts about the world 
a nd God are incapab le of personification by 
any aesthetic process." 



40 THE TEN COMMANDMENTS 



Admitting that art may, and often has, de- 
graded religion by attempting to set forth in 
form and colour that which cannot be so de- 
scribed, is it not true that art has many times 
proved itself a valuable assistant to worship? 
Dion Chrysostom, speaking of the colossal 
figure of Zeus, carved by Phidias in the temple 
at Olympia, says, "Whosoever among mortal 
men is most utterly toil-worn in spirit, having 
drunk the cup of many sorrows and calami- 
ties, when he stands before this image, me- 
thinks, must utterly forget all the terrors and 
woes of this mortal life." And in Christian 
circles there are paintings of the Face of 
Christ or figures of Him ( Thorwaldsen's, to 
name but one) , which have gained a fixed place 
in the affection of devout hearts. Many of 
our Roman Catholic brethren, and possibly 
some Protestants, find the Crucifix an aid to 
devotion. Are we to condemn with the 
severity of this Commandment the making of 
any representation whatsoever of the Divine? 

Most of us will answer, No. Such painted 
or carved images, if properly used, cannot be 
considered evil; they may be, as their users 
% assert, helps to devotion. But it is surely not 



THE SECOND COMMANDMENT 41 



without significance that no authentic memory 
whatever remains in the earth of the personal 
> appearance of Jesus of Nazareth. Many of 
His sayings have been carefully preserved in 
the very words He used; occasionally a ges- 
ture or look is mentioned in the narrative of a 
memorable act; we possess unforgetable word- 
pictures of what He did and suffered, butjiot 
a S}dlable to recall what He was to men's eyes. 
We do not know whether He was tall or short, 
stout or slight, dark or fair. Not a hint is 
given us of the shape of a single feature of 
His face nor of the colour of His eyes. How • 
accurate and full is the portrait of His spirit, 
His mind and heart! How completely lost 
in oblivion is His outward form! A careful * 
Providence has done His best to teach us that 
the religious meanings of all things, of the 
Word made flesh Himself, lie not on their sur- 
face, where the eye can see them, but hidden, 
where they can be reached only by the eyes of 
the heart. An image, a painting, runs the risk 
of giving us superficial impressions, and con- 
cealing the message to the heart and the 
conscience. We seem to be so constituted that 
when we dwell with satisfaction on that which 



42 THE TEN COMMANDMENTS 



pleases our sight, we dull our inward vision. 
Those who rejoice most heartily in pictured 
symbols of the Divine, are seldom those whose 
« consciences grave Him in righteousness in 
their own or their world's life. 

This ancient decree points out a genuine 
peril; and the history of religion enforces its 
lesson. It is they who endure as seeing Him 
who is invisible, without insisting on seeing 
some representation of Him with their eyes, 
who succeed in making His character most 
manifest in what they themselves are, and in 
what they make their homes, their work, their 
country, to be. We do not go for our stimuli 
to righteousness, nor for our highest thought 
of God, to the Greeks of the Golden Age of 
Pericles or to the Italians of the Renaissance, 

Gbut to image-forb^^ to 
image- destroyin g Reformer s^ Protes tants and 
Puritans. 

But very unfortunately Protestants and 
Puritans have not as yet satisfactorily evolved 
an art of their own that harmonises with their 
religion ; and the artistic impulse, which cannot 
be neglected, constantly revives forms not in 
keeping with the faith of freed spirits. Ben- 



THE SECOND COMMANDMENT 43 



jamin Jowett, the celebrated master of Balliol 
College, Oxford, after a tour through some of 
the cathedrals of England, observed: "It is 
the great misfortune of Protestantism never 
to have had an art or architecture. Hence it ' 
is always being jdcagged back through the 
medium of art into Romanism. The finest 
pictures and the noblest churches are Roman, 
and Roman is Pagan, and Romanism is 
dragged through the medium of art into Pa- v 
ganism, and into a bastard form of Pagan- 
ism." One can think of many a church erected 
for Protestant worship, which is not fitted for 
preaching — an invariable and most important 
part of our conception of fellowship with God 
— and which transforms the simple friendly 
meal of the Lord's Supper, where Christ's dis- 
ciples gather as one family about His table, 
into a ceremony much more in keeping with the 
partially non-Christian ideas which underlie 
the Roman Mass. We must not follow the let- 
ter of this commandment in scorning the figu- 
rative arts; they will take their own revenge 
upon us, for man is as normally artistic as he 
is religious; but we must set ourselves as a 
community to developing an art and an archi- 



44 THE TEN COMMANDMENTS 



tecture that are the natural servants of the 
spiritual religion of the God and Father of 
our Lord Jesus Christ. 

Nor is it so easy, as many think, to draw a 
sharp distinction between a graven image of 
stone that the eye can see and a graven image 
I of thought which exists only in the mind, and 
be perfectly safe with this latter representation 
of God. The real difficulty with a graven 
irnagejsjts riVidityj^Js^a fixpd, and there- 
7ore~a limjted and confining representation of 
Him who is limitless. A growing soul de- 
mands a growing thought of God; and men- 
tal images can be as stationary as marble or 
I bronze. How perilous it is to carry in one's 
I mind at twenty the same image of God that 
J stood there at ten ! How 'pathetic to see a 
I man of forty looking with the eyes of his 
I heart at a Divine Face that has no more in it 
for him than he saw there when he was one 
and twenty! Life's experiences to a believing 
spirit are, so_many discJ^ur^s__^dL_a_^eat 
HEtompaiiroiiT^ to jput 

something more into the Face of that Com- 
panion which presents itself to the mind's 
eye. Thought-images of God are constructed 



THE SECOND COMMANDMENT 45 



by every generation; they represent in some 
creed or confession of faith all that they and 
their predecessors have discovered of His 
character, expressed in the ideas and language 
of their age. And these are living things, a liv- 
ing Image, to contemporaries, or at all events 
to those who frame them ; but when passed on 
to the next generation, they are often as lifeless 
as a carved statue. We worship the God of 
our fathers; but we dare not worship our 
fathers' image of God; that is idolatry. A 
living God will not allow Himself to be con- 
fined within the rigid forms of the thought of 
any particular age, and passed on in those 
forms to its successor. A living God demands 
ever fresh attempts by living minds to think I 
Him out. They must carefully conserve all ( 
the spiritual discoveries of their predecessors; I 
they must take into account all the spiritual / 
discoveries of their own day; they must use 
all the intellectual tools their age affords them 
in graving the worthiest thought of Him to 
whom they give all their heart, soul, mind and 
strength. Not all idols ar^made of wood and 
stone ; the r^e^are^Tdols" of the mind ^Head 
thoughts of God which are not the products 



46 THE TEN COMMANDMENTS 



of a living experience of Him. To harbour 
such is to go directly counter to the spirit of 
this ancient commandment. 

But, above all, this commandment is a pro- 
test against man-made gods; our thought of 
God must be God-given. Religion is not 
man's search into the invisible, constructing 
image after image, and testing which of them 
corresponds with the Fact he discovers. Re- 
ligion is God's search for man, disclosing Him- 
self to us by everything He does for us and 
in us — by the world He made, by the natures 
He gave us in His own likeness, by all His 
acts in history, and by all His personal deal- 
ings with ourselves. Our part is not to search 
for Him, but to respond to His^sea rch for us ; 
not to fancy some imaginary Divine Being we 
would like to worship, but to picture to our 
minds Him whom we have found in our ex- 
periences constraining us to adore Him by all 
the unveilings of His goodness He has made 
to us or to any man. Hence our image of God 
will not be our fancy of the best we can dream 
of, but the God-stamped impression on our 
minds of the Best we have ever known. It 
will not be our own painting of imaginary 



THE SECOND COMMANDMENT 47 



perfection, but some disclosure to us of a 
perfection we cannot help adoring as Divine. 

Here it is that Jesus Christ fills the place 
of the image of God in Christian minds. In 
this Man who actually lived in our earth, and 
whose memory has come down to us across 
the centuries, we find "the fluent Image of the 
unstable Best." His image has been before 
twenty centuries, and each century has seen 
more in Him than its predecessors; but each 
bows with utmost reverence and declares it 
can conceive of none loftier than He. When 
we wish to place before our minds the most 
adorable Face to which to direct our worship, 
we set in our mind's eye the Face of Jesus 
Christ. When we find our consciences com- 
pelled to obey their highest Ideal, we recog- 
nise that this ideal is none other than the 
Spirit of Jesus. And Jesus is not to us a 
man-made image of God. No doubt Jesus 
Himself had to co-operate with His Father in 
attaining His perfection; but He merely 
answered the promptings of that Father Him- 
self within Him. His will was His Father's 
will; His works were His Father's business; 
His love was something He received from a 



48 THE TEN COMMANDMENTS 



Heart above Him — "As the Father hath loved 
Me, I also have loved you." Jesus is for us 
God's Self-expression in a human life, God's 
image of Himself in a Man. Aught that 
does not correspond with that image, whether 
it be told us by a Bible writer or by the voice 
of many Christian centuries, is not for us a 
true likeness of God. We 

"Correct the portrait by the living Face, 
Man's God by God's God in the mind of man." 

And while we find God imaged in Jesus, 
Jesus takes care that even this God-made 
image shall not bound and limit our thought 
of God. In Jhejsame breath in which He tells 
Philip, "He that hath seen Me hath see n 
the Father," He continues, ^ 'The Fatherj is 
gre^e¥ HianT. ?> We h ave Jesus' own warrant 
"^elTplacing ever more in our thought of God, 
more even than we find Jr^.Tesus. The "more" 
wTR~TloT^be^differeliF1from that which was in 
Him, or it would not be truly divine, truly 
like God; but every glimpse of beauty, every 
disclosure of truth, every ideal of righteous- 
ness, that comes to us from any quarter and 
is akin to the beauty, truth, righteousness of 



THE SECOND COMMANDMENT 49 



Jesus, is for us God — God revealing Himself 
to-day to us, God making a larger, truer, more 
adorable and lovable image of Himself in our 
minds, that we may answer Him with a fuller 
trust, a warmer love, a completer obedience, 
and manifest Him to the world in a diviner life. 



THE THIRD COMMANDMENT 



THE THIRD COMMANDMENT 



Exodus xx:7: "Thou shalt not take the name of the 
Lord, thy God, in vain" 

This commandment was primarily a safe- 
guard for the sanctity of oaths. On solemn 
occasions we hear Israelites calling God to wit- 
ness that they speak the truth and will surely 
perform their promise. We are familiar with 
such phrases as: "The Lord do so to me and 
more also, if — ," "As the Lord liveth," 
"Saul sware by the Lord to the witch at En- 
dor." And they were warned that "the Lord 
will not hold him guiltless that taketh His 
name in vain." 

Human society — the relations of man to 
man in government, trade, friendship, the home 
— rests upon mutual confidence ; and there can- 
not be trust where there is not truthfulness. 
Religion is the foundation of society in the 
sense that men's connection with God binds 
them to each other; their fear to lie to Him 
prevents them from lying to their neighbours, 

53 



54 THE TEN COMMANDMENTS 

at least in those instances where they deliber- 
ately invoke His name. And in a world of lies 
it is of incalculable value that there should be 
some circumstances under which one can be cer- 
tain that men are speaking verity. In the 
light of the present awful conflict in Europe, of 
what worth would it have been to have had the 
name of a God, men genuinely feared, taken to 
guarantee treaties solemnly sworn! We can- 
not but share Wordsworth's feeling: 

"Earth is sick 
And Heaven is weary of the hollow words 
Which states and kingdoms utter when they talk 
Of truth and justice/' 

We in this country, who are sincerely anxious 
to be fair, as we read the conflicting statements 
of partisans, are tempted to conclude that all 
national representatives are liars ; and we long 
to get the responsible leaders together, put 
them under oath to some Deity they revere (if 
there be any such), warn them "thou shalt not 
take the name of the Lord, thy God, in vain," 
and then try to elicit the truth. 

The social value of this ancient command- 
ment is entirely apparent ; and we still admin- 



THE THIRD COMMANDMENT 55 



ister oaths to witnesses in court, to officials 
entering upon public office, and to citizens tak- 
ing up their responsibilities as sovereigns of 
this people-ruled country. But Jesus criticised 
this commandment harshly: "Swear not at 
all ; but let your speech be Yea, yea ; Nay, nay ; 
and whatsoever is more than these is of evil." 
If we take oaths upon some occasions, we imply 
that on other occasions we may not be speaking 
the truth. No one ought to need to say of a 
Christian: "I would believe him under oath." 
It is better, to be sure, that we should be able 
to believe a man under oath, than not to be able 
to believe him under any circumstances ; but a 
Christian ought to be invariably trustworthy. 
His bare word should be entirely sufficient ; his 
Yes is yes, his No, no. Whatsoever is more, 
although it may not be of itself sinful, must be 
recognised as coming of evil, coming of the 
current untruthfulness which makes an oath 
advisable. 

And how widespread the evil is! Much of 
the general falsehood is not intentional. Peo- 
ple are slipshod in their use of language, pass 
on unverified rumours, say things because they I 
sound interesting regardless of their veracity, j 



56 THE TEN COMMANDMENTS 



"Speaking truth," says Ruskin, "is like writing 
fair, and comes only by practice; it is less a 
matter of will than of habit." We get in the 
way of colouring narratives, spicing conversa- 
tion, embroidering the plain vesture of fact; 
and our taste for simple truth is ruined. A 
large amount of inaccuracy has become a social 
convention. A scrupulous regard for fact is a 
serious drawback to entertaining conversation. 
One feels that it would be most wholesome if, 
into the midst of a group of persons chatting in 
the exaggerated and largely imaginative way 
that prevails in many social gatherings, some 
rough-spoken man, like Dr. Samuel Johnson, 
should break with his blunt demand for fact. 
In Boswell's Life is this entry : "When he and 
I were one day endeavouring to ascertain, arti- 
cle by article, how one of our friends could pos- 
sibly spend as much money in his family as he 
told us he did, Mrs. Thrale interrupted us by a 
lively extravagant sally on the expense of 
clothing his children, describing it in a very 
ludicrous and fanciful manner, Johnson looked 
a little angry and said: 'Nay, madam, when 
you are declaiming, declaim, and when you are 
calculating, calculate.' " 



THE THIRD COMMANDMENT 57 

And even when we take pains to state fact 
and nothing but fact, it is a difficult matter to 
be utterly truthful. Jowett of Balliol was fond 
of recalling an ancient philosopher who was 
afraid of telling lies and used to wag with his 
finger instead of speaking. "Afterwards he 
gave this up as partaking more or less of the 
nature of untruth." It requires no small effort 
to fulfil our Lord's commandment to make 
our Yea exactly yea, and our Nay precisely 
nay. 

And in the attempt we discover that truth- 
fulness goes back of the tongue and its speech. 
It is a quality of a man's spirit. If there is 
straightness of nature, the tongue will not lie ; 
if there is crookedness within, no matter how 
good our intentions, we shall not speak the 
truth. Emerson once wrote very searching- 
ly: "Use what language you will, you can 
never say anything but what you are. What I 
am and what I think is conveyed to you, in 
spite of my efforts to hold it back. What I 
am has been secretly conveyed from me to 
another, whilst I was vainly making up my 
mind to tell him it. He has heard from me 
what I never spoke." A Christian's entire life 



58 THE TEN COMMANDMENTS 



is named with the name of his Lord, the Lord 
of truth; and a deceitful thought, the refusal to 
look at distasteful facts, the indulgence of what 
is recognised as prejudice, is to take the name 
of the Lord, our God, in vain. "Thou desirest 
truth in the inward parts" is a psalmist's much 
more Christianlike application of this ancient 
precept. In the House of Commons Disraeli 
once said to John Bright: "Bright, I would 
give all that I ever had to have made that 
speech you made just now." "And I just said 
to him," Bright reports, "Well, you might 
have made it, if you had been honest." Where 
all life is inspired with true motives, oaths will 
be needless. All men's ordinary speech will 
be wholly trustworthy, every Yea, yea, and 
Nay, nay. 

This commandment is often quoted in 
connection with another kind of swearing — 
profanity. Happily this is now out of fash- 
ion, and is considered, among all but a few 
very young persons, to be a mark of ill- 
breeding. If one compares the conversation 
placed upon the lips of well-brought-up and 
educated men in the novels of a generation 
or more ago, when every gentleman was sup- 



THE THIRD COMMANDMENT 59 



posed to pepper and salt his speech profusely 
with curses, we can note a decided advance. 
Profanity is a sign of an impoverished vocab- 
ulary:; its users have no command of expres- 
sions for their strong feelings. Bunyan con- 
fesses : "I knew not how to speak unless I put 
an oath before, and another behind, to make 
my words have authority." A larger acquaint- 
ance with our wealthy English tongue and a 
truer sense of the weight of words, as well as 
his new Christian conscience, made him realise 
that he weakened rather than strengthened his 
speech by his invariable curses. Carlyle 
wrote of his old Scotch father: "In anger 
he had no need of oaths; his words were like 
sharp arrows that smote into the very 
heart." And he transmitted to his distin- 
guished son that vivid, forceful, adequate com- 
mand of language. 

Or profanity _is_a_jsign of impoverished 
thought. Lord Byron remarked of an ac- 
quaintance : "He knew not what to say, 
and so he swore." We are told of Laurence 
Oliphant's father that he "got into the way 
of using bad words for want of something 
to say." Our Lord supplemented this com- 



60 THE TEN COMMANDMENTS 



mandment most helpfully along these lines 
when He said solemnly: "I say unto you 
that every idle word that men shall speak, 
they shall give account thereof in the day of 
judgment." When we have nothing to say, 
we must learn not to try to say it. The 
babble of words we do not mean is not so 
harmless as we sometimes think. We acquire 
the habit of insincerity ; we divide ourselves up 
into two men, one a fairly substantial and 
thoughtful person, unknown to most of those 
who meet us, who on rare occasions comes for- 
ward and speaks ; and the other a lightweight, 
very much to the fore in all encounters, who 
talks incessantly and is usually considered 
by most of our acquaintances to be our en- 
tire self. The effect of such division is not 
only to make us hypocrites, acting a sorry role 
in the world with this impostor who in no sense 
represents our genuine thoughts and feelings, 
but to diminish the size and influence of the 
real man within. None of us has more in him 
than is required to fill the part in life as- 
signed him; we cannot afford idle words or 
idle deeds. Futilities of speech and conduct 
are costly luxuries. What we say must be 



THE THIRD COMMANDMENT 61 



what we mean, or we blaspheme the Name 
we bear as truly as if we interjected curses 
when we had nothing else to say. "For by 
thy words thou shalt be justified, and by thy 
words thou shalt be condemned." 

This commandment occurs to us in still an- 
other connection. One of the most shocking 
facts to Christian consciences at the time of the 
outbreak of this present war was the constant 
appeal to God on the part of the leaders of 
some of the warring nations, and the ascription 
of their successes to His favour. We must 
make due allowance for wrought-up emotions, 
and for the sense of the justice of their cause, 
in those who employed these expressions. 
Whether they were right or not, we need not 
question their sincerity. But to invoke the 
name of God, of the Christian God, in the work 
of slaughter and destruction, to claim Him as 
sanctioning national self-aggrandisement and 
the use of force for its accomplishment, is a 
sad indication of the widespread ignorance of 
what the name of the Christian God really sig- 
nifies. It is a pity that Christians in speaking 
of their God have got out of the way of con- 
necting Him definitely with the faith of Jesus 



62 THE TEN COMMANDMENTS 



Himself. When Paul wished to name Him, 
he said most often, "the God and Father of our 
Lord Jesus Christ." If men said "Christ's 
God," would it be as easy for them to claim 
that He is with them, blessing their weapons of 
bloody butchery, as they sally forth to make 
corpses of their brethren for whose sake Christ 
died? It is horrible to think what Mohamme- 
dans, Jews, Buddhists and heathen of various 
faiths and no faiths, must conclude regarding 
the character of the God adored by followers 
of Christ from the expressions used concerning 
Him in this unspeakable business now on in 
Christian Europe. "The name of God is blas- 
phemed among the Gentiles." Would that 
some pagan could catch the ear of the warring 
nations, and, when they are thanking their God 
for help in their work of devastation, speak up 
boldly: "Thou shalt not take the name of the 
Lord, thy God, in vain; for the Lord will not 
hold him guiltless that taketh His name in 
vain." 

Who is our God? Is He force or is He love ? 
Can we bid a departing company of armed 
troops farewell with the words : "The God of 
love be with you and bless you"? There are 



THE THIRD COMMANDMENT 63 



circumstances when Christian men feel sum- 
moned to fight and, if need be, to die in love's 
name for the protection of the oppressed and 
the unjustly dealt with; but surely no one who 
really knows the name of God in Jesus can lift 
a rifle or point a cannon or discharge a torpedo 
without feeling that the act is in itself inher- 
ently unchristian. We live in a world where 
we cannot be saved by ourselves; so long as 
there are nations that appeal to brute might 
and use it, it is hard to see how Christians, much 
as they condemn themselves, can do anything 
else but resist for the defence of their land and 
of others weaker than they ; but while they com- 
mend themselves and their cause to God's jus- 
tice, they must beware of invoking His name 
as blessing their work of slaughter. It sounds 
perilously like blasphemy to assert that He, the 
God of Jesus, the God of Calvary, is with a 
band of man-slayers on land and sea. 

But were this commandment to be phrased 
to-day might it not more likely read: "Thou 
shalt take the name of the Lord, thy God"? If 
ancient Hebrews were apt to speak of God too 
frequently, is not the modern temptation to 
mention Him too seldom ? Ours is a singularly 




64 THE TEN COMMANDMENTS 



tongue-tied faith. There must always be 
a reserve in talking of that which means 
most to us; we do not air our affection for 
wife or husband in promiscuous company, nor 
dwell upon our loyalty to some dear friend in 
casual conversation. A faith that did not sur- 
round itself with proper reticence would be 
shallow and cheap. But love and friendship 
both crave expression. However undemonstra- 
tive a person's nature, if his affection has no 
way of showing itself, it cannot live. An unut- 
tered faith stands in similar danger of suffoca- 
tion. 

Among ourselves thousands of Protestant 
Christians will have little or nothing to do with 
causes that are distinctly labelled with the 
Christian name. They are interested in social 
settlements or philanthropic societies, from 
which for obvious and sufficient reasons ex- 
plicit religious teaching is barred; but they 
take no part in the work of the Christian 
Church. They can be enlisted for a sewing 
class or a fresh air outing; but they have no 
zest for work that involves direct speech on re- 
ligious subjects. There is a widespread pas- 
sion for anonymous Christianity. But an un- 



THE THIRD COMMANDMENT 65 



named God becomes a forgotten God. Work 
undertaken originally from religious motives 
loses its power when one ceases to connect 
it openly with God. The spiritual tone and 
force gradually evaporate from those who do 
not take pains to insure that somewhere their 
spirituality shall find full expression. An 
apologetic faith that hides its head soon 
ceases to possess a believing head worth 
hiding. 

There are time-honoured, and therefore not 
indelicate, ways of taking the name of God. 
There is the custom of meeting publicly with 
other believers once a week and acknowledging 
ourselves God's children, grateful for His care, 
penitent for our unworthiness, dependent on 
His love and ready to receive His message. 
Men may say what they will about the relative 
unimportance of regular church-going, they 
may speak (and it is unfortunate that they 
have so much reason to speak) of the un- 
profitableness of many church services; the 
fact remains that one rarely finds a vigorous, 
thoughtful, earnest and devoted follower of 
Jesus who has abandoned this practice. Chris- 
tian faith is essentially social, and it does not 



66 THE TEN COMMANDMENTS 



attain normal health unless it finds systematic 
social expression. We should not have thought 
much of the Christianity of the Dutch settlers 
of Manhattan three centuries ago * had they 
not built and attended a church. Why should 
we expect less of ourselves to-day? 

There is the custom commended by many 
generations of believers of daily family wor- 
ship — surely not an immodest way of parading 
our piety to the world. The Christian religion 
is so largely a family matter ; — its chief words 
are family words — Father, son, love, home ; its 
principal method of self -perpetuation is by 
inheritance from parents to children; its first 
obligations are within the home circle — "spe- 
cially they of his own household"; its most 
typical rite is a family meal — the Lord's Sup- 
per ; that it craves an utterance in every home. 
If we are agreed that a world at war, a world 
in almost as terrible a conflict in its industrial 
relations, a world oppressing us with a burden- 
ing feeling of its wrongness, — if we are agreed 
that our world to-day needs more genuine 

* This sermon was preached on the 300th anniversary 
of the settlement of New Amsterdam — the founding of 
New York City. 



THE THIRD COMMANDMENT 67 



religion, where shall we begin to inject it, if 
not in our own household? 

There is, again, the long established usage 
of naming God in thankfulness each time we y 
sit down at table — another by no means osten- 
tatious manner of expressing faith, but a cus- 
tom omitted in many homes through diffidence, 
or even because it is not considered "smart." 
To be sure there is no more reason why one 
should thank God before eating than before 
walking or bathing or dressing; but it is a 
recognised way of taking His name, a form 
commended by the personal example of Jesus 
Himself and of centuries of His faithful fol- 
lowers. Never to allude to God is to banish 
Him from thought and heart, and to render 
life godless. 

But, above all, this sobering time calls for an 
end of our hampering shyness in taking God's 
name and advancing intelligent faith. When 
one thinks of the state of the world, and of 
the so-called Christian world, one is reminded 
of Hosea's solemn utterance : "My people are 
destroyed for lack of knowledge." We must 
face the fact of abysmal ignorance of the 
Christian God throughout the earth. Much 



68 THE TEN COMMANDMENTS 



nominal Christianity has only the faintest con- 
nection with the religion of the New Testa- 
ment. There is crass superstition; there is a 
superficial veneer of Christian words over 
pagan ideals and pagan principles; there is a 
cynical unbelief among many of ourselves that 
the kind of Deity we read of in the Gospels 
and talk of in church is the actual God who 
is Lord of heaven and earth. There is an 
urgent summons for us to name the Invisible 
to ourselves; shall we call the Deity on whom 
we rely the Father of Jesus Christ? There is 
an urgent summons for believers in that Name, 
to teach it constantly to the ignorant millions 
in our own and other lands. What possible 
assurance have we that our American people 
would not act as ungodly as any of their kins- 
men across the seas? Are we Protestant 
Christians willing to pay the cost in personal 
service, in sacrificial giving, in thoughtful and 
toilsome readaptation of our churches to meet 
present conditions, that our vast population 
shall really understand and trust in the name 
of God? Or shall we wait and be forced to 
pay the cost a thousandfold in some pagan 
catastrophe like that now turning Europe into 



THE THIRD COMMANDMENT 69 



a shambles? Are we prepared to make sacri- 
fices as great as those of war-cursed nations in 
order to maintain and push forward the Chris- 
tian missionary enterprise at home and 
throughout the world, convinced that only the 
name of the God and Father of Jesus Christ, 
known, trusted, obeyed, will lift our world out 
of its savagery into the divine-human life of 
Him, who has borne God's name as His Son? 

To thyself, to thy household, to thy mighty 
metropolitan city, to thy beloved country, to 
the world for which Christ died, thou shalt 
take the name of the Lord, thy God. 



THE FOURTH COMMANDMENT 



THE FOURTH COMMANDMENT 



Exodus xx:8: "Remember the sabbath day to keep 
it holy." 

In order to make the whole of life God's 
possession the Hebrews systematically "set 
apart" certain sections of it. One nation — 
Israel — was holy; one tribe — Levi — was 
made the priestly caste ; one building — the tem- 
ple at Jerusalem — was held sacred as God's 
dwelling-place; one part of the harvest — the 
first fruits — was dedicated; one day in every 
seven was kept free from labour as a religious 
festival. A consecrated people, a consecrated 
place, a consecrated product, a consecrated 
time — these and other similarly sanctified frag- 
ments of life were to them reminders of God's 
claims upon the world that He had made. 
"Verily ye shall keep My sabbaths," ran one 
of their oldest codes of law, "for it is a sign 
between Me and you throughout your genera- 
tions; that ye may know that I am Jehovah 
who sanctifieth you." 

73 



74 THE TEN COMMANDMENTS 



Were we to attempt to devise to-day some 
scheme for idealising life, for lifting and 
linking it to God, could we hit upon a more 
effective method? Suppose there had been 
no sabbath, would we not be inventing it? 
Does it not seem to fit in with the structure 
of our human natures? Husbands and 
wives like to recall their wedding anniversary. 
It is not that they do not love each other as 
truly on the other three hundred and sixty- 
four days in the year, nor expect as constantly 
and carefully to fulfil their mutual obligations. 
But their sentiment naturally marks this day 
from other days as commemorating their 
wedded happiness. The specially remembered 
day has something to do with their loving fidel- 
ity to each other on all other days. A sab- 
bath, a day set apart to call to mind the union 
of man's life with God, seems as inevitable and 
as natural a mode of expressing our religious 
sentiment. When the Hebrews spoke of the 
sabbath as part of the original creation, 
made in the same week with sky and earth 
and sea, and pictured God Himself as rest- 
ing on the seventh day, they were expressing 
in their way what we feel when we say that 



THE FOURTH COMMANDMENT 75 



a specially hallowed day is congruous with the 
very fabric of our beings. It is "tangled with 
all things, twin-made with all." 

Scholars tell us that the Hebrews took 
over the habit of dividing time up into 
weeks of seven days from their Semitic an- 
cestors in Babylonia, from whom also came 
the idea of holding one of these days as 
sacred to the gods, a day of ill-omen on which 
to work or journey. But Israel's faith trans- 
muted everything it received in its heritage; 
and what it made out of this day, its ancestors 
considered unlucky for work, discloses the kind 
of God Israel worshipped, the sort of festival 
they thought would please Him. Its sabbath 
was grima rily a human e day: "Six days tho u 
shalt do thy work, and on the seventh day thou 
shalt rest ; that thine ox and thine ass may have 
rest, and the son of thy handmaid and the 
sojourner may be refreshed." "In it thou 
shalt not do any work, thou, nor thy son, 
nor thy daughter, nor thy manservant, nor 
thy maidservant, nor thine ox, nor thine ass, 
nor any of thy cattle, nor the stranger that 
is within thy gates; that thy manservant and 
thy maidservant may rest as well as thou. And 



76 THE TEN COMMANDMENTS 



thou shalt remember that thou wast a servant 
in the land of Egypt." Our Lord gave the 
true interpretation of the meaning of the day, 
as it was understood by Israel's spiritual lead- 
ers who had planted it in the consciences of 
their people, when He said: "The sabbath 
was made for man." Israel's God differed 
from the deities of Babylon in His humane- 
ness ; He cared for the slave, the stranger and 
the dumb cattle. A day set apart to Him must 
be a humane day ; and the sabbath was an early 
step in leading Israel up to the conviction that 
God is love. 

This accounts for the popularity of the sab- 
/ bath in Israel. The great mass of the people 
instinctively recognised it as a safeguard 
against their exploitation, as a magna charta 
guaranteeing them rest. The only persons 
who are recorded as disliking it are grasping 
traders — "ye that would swallow up the needy, 
saying when will the sabbath be gone that we 
may set forth wheat, making the ephah small 
and the shekel great" — and devotees of amuse- 
ments, who without a sense of social responsi- 
bility found the rest day no delight. The na- 
tion as a whole clung to it more tenaciously 



THE FOURTH COMMANDMENT 77 



than to any other religious practice. Despite 
the many restrictions with which the later 
rabbis surrounded it, it does not seem to have 
been a day of burden and gloom to those who 
lived under it. A prominent Jewish scholar 
wrote a few years ago: "The sabbath is 
celebrated by the very people who did observe 
it, in hundreds of hymns, which would fill vol- 
umes, as a day of rest and joy, of pleasure and 
delight, a day in which a man enjoys some pre- 
sentiment of the pure bliss and happiness which 
are stored up for the righteous in the world to 
come." To it such tender names were applied 
as the "Queen Sabbath," and "the holy, dear, 
beloved Sabbath." 

But what meaning has the Hebrew sab- 
bath for us Christians? Technically none 
whatsoever. We are not living under law 
with prescribed observances, but in the 
Spirit of Jesus Christ. Thejaileznpt to make 
out that in the New Testament the sabbath 
is re-established, and shifted from the seventh 
to the first day of the week, is merely to read 
into the New Testament what is not there; and 
the effort to find some basis for keeping Sun- 
day as the sabbath by saying that privately 



78 THE TEN COMMANDMENTS 



our Lord, or at least His apostles, gave direc- 
tions to this effect, although they are not re- 
corded, is equally fanciful. Listen to St. Paul : 
"Let no man judge you in meat or in drink, or 
in respect of a feast day, or a new moon, or a 
sabbath day; which are a shadow of the things 
to come, but the body is Christ's." The law 
of the sabbath was for him on the same 
level with the laws as to meats and drinks and 
various festivals, a law that had its value as a 
tutor to lead to Christ, but is now no longer 
needed. Again he writes: "One man es- 
teem eth one day above another; another es- 
teemeth every day alike. Let each man be 
fully assured in his own mind." "The Lord's 
day" had its origin entirely apart from the sab- 
bath. It was not commanded by Jesus, nor by 
any of His immediate followers. It was simply 
kept for sentimental reasons by Christians as 
an appropriate day on which to come together 
for worship, because on it Jesus had risen 
from the grave, and on it at Pentecost the dis- 
ciples had received the Spirit. It was not 
a day of rest; it could not be when the 
Christians were a small minority in the popu- 
lation and possessed no political power; it was 



THE FOURTH COMMANDMENT 79 



a day of work, but after or before working- 
hours the Christians met together to revive in 
one another the spirit of their living Lord. 
Paul was not concerned with giving advice to 
churches that could influence the state to enact 
a legal holiday; he was thinking of little com- 
munities made up of slaves and artisans, who 
must live their lives under an altogether in- 
diff erent imperial government. 

But as soon as Christianity became the dom- 
inant religious force under Constantine, it ob- 
tained legislation making Sunday a day free 
from labour. Its motives were in part the 
i4 gntical m o tives that set apart the Jewish 
sabbath — the desire to obtain humane relief 
for the labouring classes; in part it wished to 
secure sufficient leisure for its religious services. 
The civilised world to-day owes this work-free f 
day to the efforts of the Christian Church. 1 
Whatever men do with it, they ought to recog- 
nise to whom they are indebted for it. 

Under the circumstances in which we find 
ourselves at present the individual Christian 
faces two problems: how to safeguard the holi- 
day and how to turn the holiday into a holy 
day. 



80 THE TEN COMMANDMENTS 



When we insist on the holiday we remember 
that Jesus came not to destroy but to fulfil. 
The sabbath as a humane institution, protect- 
ing labourers from being overworked, was 
something He prized. Whether this sabbath 
should be kept on the seventh or first day of 
each week we feel would be a matter of indif- 
ference to Him. If New York should become 
an even greater Jewish community than it now 
is, we might well discuss the question whether 
Saturday, and not Sunday, should be the 
weekly religious festival. As it is, there is 
more likelihood of the world's agreeing on the 
first than on the seventh day, and many of our 
Jewish fellow-citizens are holding Sunday 
services. Which day is of small matter; 
but the weekly holiday is a necessary pro- 
vision in the interest of humanity. Christians 
and Jews and all lovers of their fellow-men can 
combine in insisting that the community shall 
provide that on one day in every seven no man 
or woman need work; it may go farther and 
say that if special inducements are offered to 
him to labour as on the other six days, it will 
step in and forbid his working, exactly as it 
forbids his doing other unhealthy things. 



THE FOURTH COMMANDMENT 81 



And while we are speaking of what we in a 
democracy can induce the legislature to enact, 
it ought to go without saying that Christian 
employers will assure their employees the 
weekly rest-day. Unfortunately there are 
among ourselves the same two classes, against 
w hom Israel's prophets had to speak as hostile 
jt o this human holiday : pushing business -men V 
who keep their factories or their office-forces 
on duty for at least a part of Sunday in the 
greedy effort for gain, or insist that labourers 
shall toil on buildings or excavations or ma- 
chines to fulfil the time-clause in a contract or 
carry out rush-orders; and devotees o f pleas- 
ure, who are regardless sjodLthe. needs de- 



sires of others, and give social entertainments, 
or indulge in certain kinds of sport, which 
necessitate work on the part of employees. 
"The sabbath was made for man," and espe- 
cially for the man who is not in control of his 
own time, and who needs to be protected from 
the greed or thoughtlessness of those who 
would rob him of his day of rest. 

In a complex modern city it is by no means 
so easy as in agricultural Israel to select a 
single day out of the seven and have every 



82 THE TEN COMMANDMENTS 



one rest together on it. It is certainly desirable 
that as many persons as possible shall keep the 
same day ; only so can its social value, as a day 
for families to be together, for friends to see 
each other, for fellow-believers to worship in 
common, be maintained. More social con- 
science, more of the humanity that prompted 
Israel's sabbath, could reduce, and profitably 
reduce, a vast amount of the Sunday work that 
is now required. There could easily be more 
hours out of the twenty-four when the com- 
munity could agree to be quiet, and so lessen 
the necessity for transit facilities, for the open- 
ing of shops of various sorts, and for the em- 
ployment of many men and women in a host 
of positions. And this diminution of the 
quantity and decrease of the hours of Sunday 
work ought to be pushed, not primarily for re- 
ligious reasons, but for (what are really just 
as religious motives) humanitarian reasons. 
Small shop-keepers do not want to keep their 
business open all day, but they are afraid to 
lose customers, if they close while their rivals 
are open. Railroad companies keep trains 
moving so long as there is any profit in the 
traffic, and at times when there is no profit 



THE FOURTH COMMANDMENT 83 



to accommodate a small part of the public. 
We ought to aid labour-unions, and socially- 
minded organisations of all sorts, in safeguard- 
ing the weekly holiday by legislation, and es- 
pecially by the creation of public sentiment 
which lies behind every enforceable law. 

And if we insist on the holiday in the in- 
terests of humanity, we cannot content our- 
selves with a merely negative position, saying 
"You shall not labour," and give ourselves no 
concern with the positive uses to which the 
compulsory holiday shall be put. We have a 
right to protect men against themselves and 
forbid their overworking, particularly as their 
overwork probably will force a similar strain 
on others ; we have no right to compel them to 
worship. We would be glad, of course, to have 
every one wish to spend the holiday as a holy- 
day, and we can remind them that when the 
holyday vanishes the holiday is likely to disap- 
pear, but so long as some will not keep it as a 
holyday, we must agree as a community to a 
compromise. The religious element have a 
right to demand that they be guaranteed a rea- 
sonable degree of quiet for the fulfilment of 
their worship ; the less religious or non-religious 



84 THE TEN COMMANDMENTS 



elements have a right to be allowed the fullest 
indulgence in recreation, provided on the one 
hand it does not disturb worship, and on the 
other that it does not entail too hard labour, 
for that defeats the social purpose of the holi- 
day. 

For those whose callings make it impossible 
that they shall be given a day free from labour 
on the weekly sabbath, the community ought 
to insist that some equivalent amount of rest 
be assured them at other times. And the 
Church must see to it that, if possible, oppor- 
tunity for religious inspiration is accorded 
them at the time when they are free. This re- 
quires more meetings or services on the part of 
our churches, and more workers to conduct 
them; and it is a duty, to which in every great 
city the Church must address itself. 

As worshippers of a God whom we know 
to be love, we have even more reason than 
the Hebrews for insisting on the holiday as a 
divine interest. Indeed, when so many of our 
people work in factories, offices, furnaces, 
mines and similar shut-in employments, there 
is far more necessity for securing free hours 
that can be spent in the open, than in agricul- 



THE FOURTH COMMANDMENT 85 



tural Israel. The Saturday or midweek half- 
holiday seems as religious a cause for us to 
champion as the ancient sabbath-rest. If we 
can secure regularly a half -holiday for pleas- 
ure, we shall have more reason to claim the 
Sunday for religion. 

And this brings us to our Christian task of 
transforming the holiday into a holyday. Let 
us take our stand with St. Paul and remind 
ourselves that as followers of Jesus our whole 
life is to be devoted to Him. One day cannot 
TieTnorelsacred than another, for all are to be 
given exclusively to God's will. We cannot 
speak, therefore, of something as being wrong 
for us on Sunday, but right on Monday. We 
must make the best use of each day, and any- 
thing less than the best is wrong, whether it 
be week-day or Sunday; and the best, as we 
see it under Christ's guidance, is right on all 
days. It is lawful sabbath-day or any other 
day to do good. 

But here is a day that has been won as a 
holiday by the Christians of the past, and that 
is hallowed by the remembrance of Jesus's 
victory and called "The Lord's Day." There 
is no divine law telling us how to spend it, for 



86 THE TEN COMMANDMENTS 



we are not servants but friends. We have to 
ask ourselves as intelligent and thoughtful sons 
of God how we can most appropriately use the 
day. Instead of discussing what is right or 
wrong on Sunday, let us think of what is ap- 
propriate or inappropriate. 

The God to whom we keep the day holy is 
called "Father." His festival day seems fit- 
tingly to be a family day. There are few 
enough contacts between parents and children, 
between the members of the household. What 
more suitable to the day than some simple 
family gathering for worship — Bible reading, 
prayer, perhaps hymn-singing? Where there 
are young children, this is surely the day when 
father and mother should try to pass on to 
i them their inheritance of Christian faith. No 
Church and Sunday School training can take 
the place of home lessons in religion. The 
most delightful books, the best-loved stories, 
the most-prized walks with a usually busy 
father, ought to be kept to mark this as the 
best day in the week. 

Again, this God to whom we hallow the 
holiday has brought us into a larger family 
—"the household of faith." That family 



THE FOURTH COMMANDMENT 87 



gathers in the house of God and enters col- 
lectively into the Father's larger life. Re- i 
ligion will not long remain vital in the life 
that loses touch with fellow believers. It is > 
all very well to say that we are as near 
to God under the blue sky as in a Church 
building, that we can worship just as well 
by doing some quiet thinking as by singing 
hymns and listening to prayers and ser- 
mons, but the fact remains that thejhaught 
of God fades out of the heart that is not 
restamped with it by the weekly reminder 
of Him in the house set apart for His wor- 
ship. A special day is observed by something 
appropriate to its meaning. The Fourth of \ 
July demands a patriotic observance as the 
nation's birthday. Sunday requires a Church 
service as the Church's birthday, the anni- * 
versary of its awakening to the joyous faith 
in love's victory in Christ and to the sense of 
its spiritual power through sharing His Spirit 
of love to set up His Kingdom in the whole 
world's life. 

Above all, if we make the day holy to the 
Father of Jesus Christ, His special interest 
is in His most needy children. His chief 



88 THE TEN COMMANDMENTS 



delight is not in the ninety and nine just 
persons who are already conscientious, but 
in the sinner who is led to repentance, in the 
child who is brought to dedicate his life to 
righteousness. Unless we provide to the ex- 
tent of our abilities for some work on Sunday 
for the benefit of others who need our sym- 
pathy, our knowledge, our faith, we do not 
spend it suitably as the day of the Lord Jesus, 
the day we hallow to His God and Father. 
, Because we are under no Sabbath law 
each of us must settle for himself, as an in- 
dependent and responsible child of God, how 
he shall keep the day holy. John was "in the 
Spirit on the Lord's day" and had certain 
great experiences; but had James or Peter 
or Paul been in the Spirit on the Lord's day 
on Patmos their ways of receiving and 
showing that same Spirit would have been cer- 
tainly different. Not by following prescribed 
rules, but by surrendering ourselves thought- 
fully and conscientiously to the control of the 
of (^ristTshall we discover Bow toniaK 
our Sundays most godlike, labour-free days. 
We shall differ widely; there will be the unity 
of the Spirit. 



^girit 



THE FOURTH COMMANDMENT 89 



And the uses to which we put our Sundays 
are searching tests of what we are. Those who 
devote them largely to physical exercise, dis- 
close themselves as seeking primarily to be 
healthy animals. Those who set them apart 
for a good time, write themselves down as car- 
ing most for pleasure. Those who use them 
for friendly visits, announce themselves as so- 
ciably minded men and women of this world, 
whose horizons are bounded and whose hearts 
are satisfied with the associations of earth. 
Those who deliberately devote the day to the 
Father in heaven, to binding their homes to 
Him, to contributing their presence to the wor- 
shipping company of His children, to accom- 
plishing some part of His purpose for breth- 
ren who need what they can supply, judge 
themselves children of God, unsatisfied with- 
out a glimpse of the King in His beauty and 
of the land of far distances. Xhe judgment "~ 
all the more significant in an age like ours 
when there is no strong social pressure on us 
to hallow the day, but rather the reverse; and 
when we frankly recognise that we are under 
no divine commandment, but acting freely as 
trusted friends of Jesus. The holiday comes 



90 THE TEN COMMANDMENTS 



to us as a bequest from the believers of the 
past who won it for humanity's sake, and who 
hallowed it as the Lord's day for Christ's sake ; 
and the use to which we put it makes it a judg- 
ment day, our judgment of what we are and 
seek. 



THE FIFTH COMMANDMENT 



THE FIFTH COMMANDMENT 



Exodus xx: 12: "Honour thy father and thy mother" 

No one chooses his parents ; and in a demo- 
cratic age, when the freedom of the individual 
to select his own rulers and determine for 
himself those to whom he will give his loyalty 
and obedience is a fundamental principle, there 
is a very different attitude towards hereditary 
obligations than under a monarchy. Parents 
are frequently regarded as an accident of 
birth. Some people are quite certain that, had 
they picked their own father and mother, they 
would have made other selections. They find 
themselves heirs of an undesirable inheritance. 
They trace the pedigree of their mosiLhamper- 
ing characteristics, their least likable faults, 
their unloveliest weaknesses, directly to their 
ancestors. William Dean Howells has writ- 
ten: 

"That swollen paunch you are doomed to bear 
Your gluttonous grandsire used to wear; 
93 



94 THE TEN COMMANDMENTS 



That tongue at once so light and dull, 
Wagged in your grandma's empty skull; 
That leering of the sensual eye, 
Your father, when he came to die, 
Left you alone; and that cheap flirt, 
Your mother, gave you from the dirt 
The simper which she used upon 
So many men ere he was won." 

And even where the gifts of heredity are 
prized, there is often a maladjustment of tem- 
peraments to each other that assures almost 
constant friction between parents and chil- 
dren. Sometimes it is due to the utter unlike- 
ness of children to parents; with features and 
voice and walk that duplicate father's or 
mother's, the nature within appears to have 
been born of some other spirit altogether. 
Oftener it is their very likeness in disposition 
that produces disagreement. Father and son, 
mother and daughter, admirable in themselves, 
are too alike to get on well together. Two 
strong wills are nearly foredoomed to clash; 
two impulsive natures are well nigh certain 
to produce in each other an explosion of feel- 
ing and temper; two reserved people are all 
but predestined to mutual misunderstandings. 
George Eliot, that keen analyst of the effects 



THE FIFTH COMMANDMENT 95 



of characters upon each other, says in describ- 
ing the resemblance and difference between 
Adam Bede and his mother: "Family like- 
ness has often a deep sadness in it. Nature, 
that great tragic dramatist, knits us together 
by bone and muscle, and divides us by the 
subtler web of our brains; blends yearning 
and repulsion ; and ties us by our heart-strings 
to the beings that jar us at every movement. 
We hear a voice with the very cadence of our 
own uttering the thoughts we despise; we see 
eyes — ah! so like our mother's — averted from 
us in cold alienation; and our last darling 
child startles us with the air and gestures of 
the sister we parted from in bitterness long 
years ago. The father to whom we owe our 
best heritage — the mechanical instinct, the 
keen sensibility to harmony, the unconscious 
skill of the modelling hand — galls us, and puts 
us to shame by his daily errors; the long-lost 
mother, whose face we begin to see in the 
glass as our wrinkles come, once fretted our 
young souls with her anxious humours and 
irrational persistence." 

We provide for divorces between husbands 
and wives, who cannot endure living together ; 



96 THE TEN COMMANDMENTS 



is it reasonable that there should be no repu- 
table way by which sons and daughters can 
free themselves from obligations to parents 
whom they discover to be intolerable? 

The difficulties of maintaining the proper 
relations between children and parents are 
vastly increased among ourselves by two fac- 

^ •> M — I,,, !■ iiiiiiinlWirr -in mi ii n j mm *— — — —» 

tors. One is the change in social status due to 
l3ie acquisition of wealth or of education. Son 
or daughter find themselves living in a dif- 
ferent world from that to which father and 
mother are accustomed, and in which they will 
continue to live so long as life lasts. It is a 
world of other ideas and other ideals; several 
centuries seem to lie between two immediately 
touching generations. A great gulf divides 
their feelings, their sympathies, their opinions, 
their convictions, even their consciences. 
Sometimes we should call the older genera- 
tion better than the younger ; as often, perhaps, 
the children are better than their parents. But 
no matter with which the advantage lies, the 
difficulty of preserving the right relations be- 
tween the two becomes acute. We can all 
think of tragic situations where father and 
mother have toiled and saved, and given their 



THE FIFTH COMMANDMENT 97 



children advantages of culture and social posi- 
tion they never themselves possessed, only to 
have a chasm sunder son or daughter from 
them. 

The other is the change in country that 
works such havoc with the family ties in hosts 
of our immigrant homes. Children, born here 
or brought here young, grow up in our atmos- 
phere, are trained in our schools, imbibe our 
ideals and find themselves thousands of miles 
away in sentiment and thought and faith from 
their parents. Very often they know far more, 
have much keener intuitions and brighter 
minds, are actually earning more at eighteen 
than father and mother can earn, and instead 
of children looking up to and being led by par- 
ents, the relationship is reversed, and the chil- 
dren lead them into the unfamiliar ways of 
the new land of their adoption. It is not only 
that son and daughter speak naturally a dif- 
ferent language and can hardly express them- 
selves in the parental tongue, but that they 
are different in mind and heart, in the very 
structure and fibre of their beings. Home 
tragedies frequently result; and one scarcely 
knows which is the more to blame, or whether 



98 THE TEN COMMANDMENTS 



either is really blameworthy when circum- 
stances have so widely separated the two gen- 
erations. 

To what extent can we apply a command- 
ment, devised for tribesmen among whom sons 
and daughters grew up to follow the callings 
and repeat almost exactly the careers of their 
ancestors, to conditions where the lives of chil- 
dren are so totally unlike those in which their 
parents were reared? 

Has it not been a cardinal error of our in- 
dividualism to think so often of our obliga- 
tions as voluntary? Many men regard civic 
duties as purely optional; they may be in- 
terested in politics, they do not feel that they 
must. We may burden ourselves with the 
woes of our brethren in war-stricken Europe; 
but we are sensible of no irresistible moral com- 
pulsion. The more social conscience into which 
God is trying to educate us will certainly rec- 
ognise obligations in many more relationships 
which we have had no choice whatsoever in 
forming. Responsibilities are almost never 
willingly and freely chosen; they are thrust 
upon us. And family ties, with whose forma- 
tion we had nothing to do, are just those best 



THE FIFTH COMMANDMENT 99 



fitted to stretch our consciences and develop 
us into the larger, more brotherly-minded chil- 
dren of God it is our Father's main aim to 
produce. 

Happily very few of us wish to exchange 
our parents for others. We may see faults 
in them; for love need not be blind; but we 
see infinitely more to love and revere. We 
cannot forget that in our helpless infancy it 
was their devotion that watched our every 
breath, kept us alive through numberless 
childish ills, soothed our small but very real 
sorrows, planned our happiness, bore in pa- 
tience with our early but often precociously 
mature iniquities, thought us wonderful 
when to all other eyes we were very ordinary 
children, discovered music in our voices, 
wisdom in our sayings, beauty in our faces, 
saintliness in our actions and a charm in our 
companionship, when to everybody else we 
were shrill-toned, stupid or forward, plain, 
mischievous, troublesome specimens of young 
humanity. They may have spoiled us; they 
may have disciplined us unwisely ; there may be 
a great many things we wish they had done 
or had left undone for us in our childhood; 



100 THE TEN COMMANDMENTS 



but they loved us. There is probably not a 
life here behind which does not lie very gen- 
uine parental sacrifice ; and behind many of us 
lies a sacrifice comparable only to that supreme 
Self -offering on Calvary. Father and mother 
scarcely had a thought in which we did not 
occur, made no plan that did not include our 
welfare or pleasure, forwent many an interest- 
ing amusement and denied themselves many 
much desired benefits that they might give us 
advantages, and day and night freely spent 
and were spent for our sakes. Not to treat 
them with the utmost deference, not to yield 
them heartiest and most considerate affection, 
is to show ourselves contemptible ingrates. 

Many persons are puzzled by finding a spe- 
cial reward attached to this commandment. 
Paul calls it "the first commandment with 
promise." Why should honouring father and 
mother be recompensed more than fidelity to 
God or remembering the Sabbath? It seems 
less necessary to offer an inducement to keep 
this commandment because it is easier to many 
of us than some of the rest. And is it true 
that those who respect their parents live longer 
than those who do not? Rewards in the Bible 



THE FIFTH COMMANDMENT 101 



are always results. This is not a bribe to entice 
us to fulfil our filial duties; this is a state- 
ment by the law-giver of the experience of 
men, that children who defer to the maturer 
judgment of their elders avoid the life-shorten- 
ing follies of youth. It is a common-sense 
statement which is borne out by the experience 
of the race in every generation. 

It seems slightly unfair that the Deca- 
logue should contain a commandment for chil- 
dren, but none for parents. Paul, when he 
writes "Children obey your parents in the 
Lord," at once adds, "And ye fathers provoke 
not your children to wrath, but nurture them 
in the chastening and admonition (the disci- 
pline and training) of the Lord." One would 
like to insert Commandment No. 5 A, "Fath- 
ers and mothers prove yourself honourable." 
Most parents receive all the respect they de- 
serve ; and there are some who make it exceed- 
ingly difficult for their children to reverence 
them. Not to speak of positive wickedness, 
there are so many whose smallness or flippancy 
or silliness or emptiness do not render them 
easily honoured. There is something, further, 
in the spirit of our age that has altered parents 



102 THE TEN COMMANDMENTS 



as profoundly as in other ways it has altered 
children. It is a common remark that there 
are no more old people. One very rarely 
meets man or woman to whom one could apply 
the adjective "venerable," or who would them- 
selves like to have such an adjective applied to 
them. Our grandmothers used to acquiesce in 
old age, often accept it as a proud distinction, 
and both dressed and acted the part. Their 
coevals to-day take the utmost pains not to 
seem elderly. Perhaps the advances of medical 
science, with its devices for counteracting some 
some of the crippling infirmities of age, may ac- 
count in part for the change. Surely it is right 
that men and women should keep themselves 
limber and active and alive in interest that they 
may be useful as long as they possibly can. But 
is there anything more deadening to respect 
than the silly effort to appear more youthful 
than one really is? It is a fine thing for par- 
ents to make themselves companions and com- 
rades of their children; but "chumminess" won 
at the cost of reverence is a questionable gain 
for both children and parents. 

To be sure, parents do not want to be ask- 
ing themselves, "How can I make my children 



THE FIFTH COMMANDMENT 103 



honour me?" When any of us begins to think 
about his dignity, he becomes inevitably less 
dignified. Honour comes without seeking to 
those whose purposes are sufficiently high, 
whose lives are devoted to aims men cannot 
help respecting, whose consciences and convic- 
tions lift them above things petty and con- 
temptible. True comradeship of the closest 
sort need not in the least do away with unfail- 
ing respect, but rather enhances it when father 
and son, mother and daughter are companions 
in that which is in itself exalting. And the 
surest road to true honour lies in so living with 
the Most High, and so taking children into the 
life with Him, that their thoughts of God, their 
hallowed thoughts, will naturally include you. 
Thomas Carlyle exclaims with heartfelt devo- 
tion: "Oh, pious mother, kind, good, brave 
and truthful soul as I have ever found in this 
world, your poor Tom has fallen very lonely, 
very lame and broken in this pilgrimage of his ; 
and you cannot help by a kind word any more. 
But from your grave in Ecclefechan Kirkyard 
yonder you bid him trust in God ; and that also 
he will try to do, for the conquest of the world 
and of death and hell does verily lie in that." 



104 THE TEN COMMANDMENTS 



Robert Louis Stevenson writes to his father: 
"I wish that I might become a man worth talk- 
ing of, if it were only that you should not have 
thrown away your pains;" and Mrs. Napier 
says of the son: "In the Vailima prayers I 
seem to hear again an old melody that I know 
well — the echo of his father's words and daily 
devotions. ,, How many of the boys and girls 
of this congregation hear father or mother 
praying with and for them? How many will 
link father's and mother's name in reverence 
their longest day with that of God, because, 
through what they have taught them and 
through what they have themselves been 
to them, they have come to know and honour 
the Most Highest? 

The Bible has a method of placing our 
duties around us in a series of concentric 
circles; and, by training us to be faithful to 
those in the smallest and most immediate 
circles, of educating us to reach out and include 
the wider. The child's first circle is the home 
and the lesson to be learned there is honour. 
~N.ot obedience merely, but the habit of looking 
up toothers-wdth consideration and respect for 
them as better than we, with deference to their 



THE FIFTH COMMANDMENT 105 

judgment and wishes — that is our first devel- 
opment in character. Unless it is learned in the 
first circle, it is likely never to be learned ; and 
the life that never considers others, respects 
them and defers to their wishes is a pitiably 
distorted life. Carlyle was describing a Scot- 
tish rather than an American home when he 
wrote of his early days: "An inflexible ele- 
ment of authority surrounded us all. We felt 
from the first (a useful thing) that our own 
wish had often nothing to do in the matter." 
We want to educate not to break the will; 
and we want the co-operation, the willing 
agreement of children, in what we plan for 
them. But is there not an opposite extreme in 
many homes among ourselves, where children 
are allowed to exercise their wishes and whims, 
without being taught to consider and respect 
the wiser and maturer wishes of their elders? 
Children who are not trained to consider — and 
that means to respect and defer to the desires 
of their parents— grow up warped towards sel- 
fishness, to become unfit, largely because of 
their lack of considerateness, for marriage and 
friendship and all the social relationships of 
life. 



106 THE TEN COMMANDMENTS 

A wider circle which surrounds the home is 
the land with its laws. "Honour thy father 
and thy mother" is succeeded by "honour the 
king" — respect constituted authority. A home 
V which does not enforce its demands presents 
the state with lawless citizens. Many of those 
who deplore want of regard for law and order 
are producing little anarchists in their own 
households. Reverence for the will of the 
family, a will not arbitrarily and despotically 
imposed, but established by wise love over chil- 
dren who so far as possible are taught to see its 
wisdom and to feel its love, is the source of re- 
spect for the authority of a democracy, where 
the individual must submit himself to the will 
of the community which he is given his full 
share in forming. 

And outside the circle of one's country lies 
the more inclusive circle which embraces the 
whole race. If the first commandment we learn 
to fulfil is "Honour thy father and thy 
mother," the last, which occupies us our life 
long, and which it may require some sections 
of eternity for us fully to master, is : "Honour 
all men." And unless in childhood we have 
learned to look up to somebody and have 



THE FIFTH COMMANDMENT 107 



caught that attitude so firmly that we cannot 
be bent or twisted out of it by all the circum- 
stances of life that tempt us to look down on 
men, we have scant chance of acquiring it later. 
We are debarred from intimacies with men; 
for we only get near to them as we go up to 
them. We are handicapped in our sympathies, 
for sympathy begins with appreciation — a 
form of honour. We are likely to pass our 
days landlocked in a little puddle of our own 
prejudices, while the great ocean of human life 
lies outside, waiting to carry us to its many, 
many shores. We are seriously, if not fatally, 
crippled for the most sacred of human rela- 
tions — marriage; for wedded happiness can 
only exist between two mutally reverencing 
beings. The word "honour" in the marriage 
service is fully as important as the word "love," 
and there can be no love worthy the name with- 
out honour. The child unschooled to honour 
father and mother will turn out the husband 
or wife that wrecks a home. And without this 
fundamental lesson we are cut off from all 
broadening and enriching contacts with other 
people; for we learn from them only as we 
look up to them; we draw out their best only 



108 THE TEN COMMANDMENTS 



as we approach them with respect; we tempt 
them to show us their sacred things only as we 
make them sure that whatever is prized by 
them will be invariably revered by us. Yes, 
the source of all helpful and happy intercourse 
with other human beings whatsoever lies back 
in this primary home duty: "Honour thy 
father and thy mother. 

And the circle of our duties does not stop 
with men; the circumference of our contacts 
goes out to the unseen and reaches the living 
God. Goethe makes Faust say: "The thrill 
of awe is man's best quality." Those of you 
who have seen Raphael's frescoes in the Vati- 
can may have noticed that in the "Philosophi- 
cal School" no face is looking up, while in the 
"Theological School" (The Disputa) opposite, 
every face is lifted. No man ever gets close 
to God save as he goes up to Him. Those who 
treat the Deity with the familiarity of an equal, 
or even venture to offer him their distinguished 
patronage, have not the remotest touch with 
the God and Father of Jesus Christ. Jesus 
dwelt in His Father's love, but He said "Hal- 
lowed be Thy name," "I thank Thee, Father, 
Lord." That is a striking saying of St. Paul's, 



THE FIFTH COMMANDMENT 109 



"I bow my knees unto the Father, of whom 
every fatherhood in heaven and on earth is 
named." The divine name is conferred on 
parents; they are to play Providence to their 
children, to ban or bless them. They are to 
represent the Divine, the honourable and ador- 
able to them. Father or mother who do not 
deserve honour, foster irreligion and every 
other unhappiness in a child. Children who 
instinctively look up, because the beings they 
know first and best command their reverence, 
catch the attitude of spirit within whose ken in 
due time the Divine will swim, and the honour 
they have learned to give those who bore the 
fatherly name on earth will give itself fully to 
the great Father of all. 

"Honour thy father and mother (which is 
the first commandment with promise) that it 
may be well with thee," and that thy days may 
be long in the earth with its enriching human 
relations, and longer still in the heavens with 
their hallowed fellowships that abide forever. 



THE SIXTH COMMANDMENT 



THE SIXTH COMMANDMENT 



Exodus xx:13: "Thou shalt not MIL" 

There is almost an element of humour in 
preaching against murder to a congregation 
of respectable people like ourselves. Did we 
really think that the man in the next pew 
might possibly be "a gunman" or the woman 
across the aisle a prospective poisoner, how 
very uncomfortable we should feel! And if 
the preacher should say, "I have a special word 
this morning for those who have recently mur- 
dered someone," we should look about us with 
a shudder, and wonder what sort of company 
we had got into. It is well for us to remember 
that there are Christian congregations in some 
parts of the world — in Africa, in the Island of 
Formosa, among the head hunters in the Phil- 
ippines — where pillars of the Church are 
former man-slayers. From the beginning the 
Gospel of Christ has not hesitated to deal with 
the most brutal elements of mankind. It sur- 

113 



114 THE TEN COMMANDMENTS 



prises us to hear Peter writing in his first 
epistle: "Let none of you suffer as a mur- 
derer." How could Christians need any such 
warning? Think out of what stuff the apos- 
tles had to manufacture Christians! And if 
murder appears to be so unthinkable to us 
that we smile at the thought of a sermon 
preached to us from the Sixth Commandment, 
let us not forget that we owe the security of our 
own lives in this community very largely to 
the work of the Christian Church in the past 
centuries, and to the prevalence of Christian 
ideals and sentiments throughout our land to- 
day. If these ideals became weaker in our 
own city, who knows what an increase in acts 
of violence we should witness? Home Mis- 

I sions is indirectly the most profitable form of 
life insurance. 

l The old Jewish legislation took cognizance 
of forms of murder other than deliberate kill- 
ing. In the Book of Exodus we read: "If an 
ox gore a man or a woman to death, the ox 
shall be surely stoned, and its flesh shall not be 
eaten; but the owner of the ox shall be quit. 
But if the ox was wont to gore in time past, 
and it hath been testified to its owner, and he 



THE SIXTH COMMANDMENT 115 



hath not kept it in, but it hath killed a man or 
a woman ; the ox shall be stoned, and its owner 
also shall be put to death." The responsibility 
of the owners — be they stockholders, or direct- 
ors, or managers — for accidents, when they 
know that they have neglected proper precau- 
tions, is the modern equivalent of that ancient 
statute. The corporation, which in its eager- 
ness for dividends allows grade-crossings to 
remain, or to remain unguarded, which does 
not introduce safety-appliances, which breaks 
the fire laws in its buildings, which permits un- 
sanitary conditions to prevail in its plant, 
which caters to the desire for speed at the risk 
of disaster, which fails to insist on constant and 
careful inspection of machinery, workrooms, 
tracks, bridges and the like, is repeating the 
same perilous experiment of leaving a dan- 
gerous ox at large. Present-day legislators 
are trying to find a way by which they can 
make someone as personally liable as these an- 
cient lawgivers held the ox's owner. Every 
preventable accident ought to mean that some- 
body will be punished; life cannot otherwise 
be adequately protected. 

There are still other and subtler ways of 



116 THE TEN COMMANDMENTS 



committing murder. Work may be paid so 
poorly that life cannot be supported on the 
wages. Long ago, Tom Hood wrote The 
Song of the Shirt: 

Work — work — work, 

Till the brain begins to swim; 
Work — work — work, 

Till the eyes are heavy and dim! 
Seam and gusset and band, 

Band and gusset and seam, 
Till over the buttons I fall asleep, 

And sew them on in a dream! 

Work — work — work ! 

My labour never flags; 
And what are its wages? A bed of straw — 

A crust of bread — and rags. 
That shattered roof — and this naked floor — 

A table — a broken chair — 
And a wall so blank, my shadow I thank 

For sometimes falling there. 

Oh God! that bread should be so dear, 
And flesh and blood so cheap! 

And where human lives are used up in our 
commercial machinery, it is not easy to fix the 
blame. If we hold the employer, he will point 
out that his profits are not unreasonable, and 
that he is forced to keep his prices down by 



THE SIXTH COMMANDMENT 117 



keen competition; if we hold the department 
store, where the goods are sold, they, too, will 
remind us that business risks are great, and the 
pressure of rivals difficult to meet. The fact 
is that there is guilt which we all— public, 
middlemen, manufacturers — must share, and 
which, because our part of it seems a trifling 
fraction, we dare not minimize. The whole sub- 
ject of "the living wage" is complicated, and 
must be handled with painstaking study; but 
it is for us as Christians to insist that it shall 
be handled, that it is the community's duty — 
our bounden duty, yours and mine — to see to 
it that labour is properly paid. "Thou shalt 
not kill." 

Or again, work may not be obtainable, and 
starvation may face a willing toiler who can- 
not find employment. We believe in the right f 
to live ; we have not been as accustomed to as- 
sert the right to obtain the means to live, the 
right to work. When industries are affected 
by a world catastrophe such as that which is at 
present convulsing Europe, it is not surprising 
that there should be many thousands of unem- 
ployed men and women; but we have to con- 
front the situation that without any such dis- 



118 THE TEN COMMANDMENTS 



aster there is normally a large number of work- 
less people every year among us. We have 
never thought that it was anybody's obligation 
to find them work ; they were expected to seek 
it for themselves; and that was much more 
possible in our less crowded days. With the 
growth of the social conscience and the pres- 
sure of our vaster population we are commenc- 
ing to feel that it is the community's duty to 
assist people to obtain employment. The prob- 
lem is exceedingly difficult; among the unem- 
s\ ployed there are always loafers, incompetents, 
and ne'er-do-weels ; men trained to one line of 
labour cannot readily be shifted to another; 
many jobs are necessarily temporary, and la- 
bourers must move about if they are to keep 
employed. Some of our churches — our own, 
for instance — have not been able to solve the 
much simpler problem of getting churchless 
ministers and ministerless churches together; 
and the countrywide and worldwide problem of 
unemployment is bewilderingly difficult. But 
its solution will be forthcoming only as our con- 
sciences insist that social machinery shall be 
devised by which no willing worker need re- 
main idle. It may not offer him the position 



THE SIXTH COMMANDMENT 119 



he would like, but it will guarantee him and 
his a livelihood, provided he is not too lazy to 
do a reasonable amount of hard labour. To 
the end of time the stimulus of hunger may 
have to be resorted to in the case of the slug- 
gard, and we have Scriptural authority for 
such pressure in the apostle's statement: "If 
any will not work, neither let him eat"; but 
where any will work, the ancient command- 
ment is addressed to us: "Thou shalt not 
kill." 

Two, often debated, questions are raised in 
our minds by this injunction — capital pun-^ 
ishment and war. To be sure, the command- 
ment did not seem to those to whom it was 
given to interfere with either. The death pen- 
alty is prescribed by Israel's lawgivers for sev- 
eral offences, and Israel's greatest saints were ^ 
frequently redoubtable warriors. But "time 
makes ancient good uncouth," and we are not 
living under the law of Moses, but under the 
Spirit of Jesus. 

The Christian's interest in the treatment of 
the wrong-doer is not retribution — life for life; , 
nor is it the protection of society by vindicat- 
ing the sanctity of law and making a deterrent 



120 THE TEN COMMANDMENTS 



example of the criminal. These were Old Tes- 
tament interests: "Whoso sheddeth man's 
blood, by man shall his blood be shed; for in 
^the image of God made He man." But, "For- 
x give us our debts as we forgive our debtors" is 
the prayer Jesus puts on the lips of Christian 
society. We are to be merciful as our God is 
merciful, just as He is just. His mercy is 
transforming; His justice is redemptive. His 
love is no good-natured sentiment that allows 
itself to be imposed on, but a passionate devo- 
tion that does not cease to strive to make His 
children righteous. One who has deliberately 
taken another's life cannot be left where he 
may do the like again, nor can he be allowed 
to remain without the severest discipline re- 
quisite to give him a right conscience, self-con- 
trol and a brotherly heart. But to put him in 
an electric chair is simply a short and easy 
way for society to rid itself of a menace, and 
to absolve itself from attempting the self-sac- 
rificing labour necessary to make over a mur- 
derer into a child of God. "He is faithful 
and just to forgive us our sin and to cleanse 
us from all unrighteousness. Be ye therefore 
merciful as your Father is merciful." 



THE SIXTH COMMANDMENT 121 



Nor can war ever commend itself to the 
Christian conscience. How can anyone point 
a rifle, or drop a bomb, or plant a mine, "in 
the name of Jesus"? And it is written, "What- 
soever ye do, in word or in deed, do all in the 
name of the Lord Jesus." What we cannot i 
do in His name, we are not to do at all. 

But we must remember an expression which 
Jesus used in connection with His command, 
"Swear not at all." He was insisting that 
among Christians a man's word should be so 
reliable that all oaths would be superfluous, 
and He said "Whatsoever is more cometh of 
evil" meaning that in an evil world an oath 
might be expedient, but must be recognised as 
due to evil. War cometh of evil, and as Chris- * 
tians we must see to it that we do nothing to 
make it come. But when war comes upon a 
land, there is nothing for Christians but to take 
arms and do their part in defending themselves 
and theirs from attack. We cannot be saved 
from evil until all others are saved with us; 
and while evil persists, driving men to strife, 
it is not the part of Christian love, either to the 
invaders or to those who look to us for protec- 
tion, to let the assailants wreak their purpose 



122 THE TEN COMMANDMENTS 



upon us. But let us make clear that slaughter 
of our brethren is inherently incompatible with 
the mind of Christ ; it cometh only of evil. 

In a world like ours we often face merely 
a choice of evils ; neither alternative is entirely 
Christian. In 1861 our fathers faced the issue 
of slavery or war ; and to-day few men, South 
or North, regret that war was chosen, the issue 
settled, and slavery banished from the land. 
Our brethren overseas have been confronted 
by what seemed to them a similar choice of 
evils; it is not for us to judge them, that we 
be not judged; but to hope and pray that this 
frightful wholesale killing will once and for 
all relegate war to the class of unthinkable so- 
lutions of differences of opinion, as among our- 
selves the duel is gone forever. 

Jesus dealt explicitly with this ancient com- 
mandment. "Ye have heard that it was said to 
them of old time, Thou shalt not kill ; and who- 
soever shall kill shall be in danger of the judg- 
ment ; but I say unto you, that every one who 
is angry with his brother shall be in danger of 
the judgment; and whosoever shall say to his 
brother, Raca (good-for-nothing), shall be in 
danger of the council ; and whosoever shall say, 



THE SIXTH COMMANDMENT 123 



Thou fool (worthless wretch), shall be in dan- 
ger of the hell of fire." Jesus is, of course, not 
giving a new law that is to be enacted into 
statutes, as the Mosaic commandments were 
made the common law of Israel. He is giving 
His followers ideals and standards. "You have 
been told not to murder ; I tell you not to be 
angry with anyone, not to be contemptuous 
of anyone as a stupid fellow, not to condemn 
anyone as morally worthless." It is His way 
of getting at the underlying principle of the 
old commandment. "Thou shalt not kill" as- 
serts the sanctity of a human being because he 
is made in the image of God. Jesus tells us 
that there are other ways of violating that 
sanctity than by putting him to death. One 
is losing your temper in dealing with him. You 
may not say a word; you may control both 
tongue and facial expression; but in thought 
you have no use for him. That for Jesus is 
ungodliness, because God has use for this man ; 
God cherishes no such irritated feeling. An- 
other is letting out some rather mild expression 
derogatory of the other man's ability. Raca 
seems to mean little worse than "You stupid"; 
it does not imply contempt for a man's charac- 



124 THE TEN COMMANDMENTS 



ter, only for his head or his skill. That, too, 
for Jesus is ungodlike, for God has made no 
human being good for nothing. A third is 
calling a man a scoundrel, a moral re probat e. 
Such is the Hebrew significance of "fool." 
That is ungodlike, for none is morally worth- 
less ; there are possibilities of good in the lowest. 
Jesus is concerned with our feelings towards 
men, for "from within out of the heart of man 
proceed murders." 

Let us remind ourselves what Jesus has suc- 
ceeded in accomplishing in rendering human 
beings sacred to each other. There is no more 
striking chapter in the record of the moral 
progress of mankind than that which treats of 
the new ideas of the sanctity of human life that 
entered the world with the spread of Chris- 
V tianity. In the Roman world, as in the non- 
Christian world to-day, an unborn child was 
not protected against death by abortion; but 
the new feeling that here was an immortal child 
of the Father in heaven enacted legislation 
which is operative to this day. Nor was there 
any sentiment against disposing of a new-born 
baby, when its parents did not wish to rear it. 
Until very recently a cart went about the 



THE SIXTH COMMANDMENT 125 



streets of Pekin gathering up the bodies of 
dead infants whose families chose to throw ■ 
them out rather than keep them alive. Rome, 
for military reasons, sought to insist that all 
healthy male babies should be kept; but the 
deformed or weakly and all female babies 
might be exposed with impunity. The new 
Christian conscience battled for centuries for 
the lives of little children ; it battles still in the 
campaign to safeguard their health, to protect 
them from infection, to guarantee the city's 
milk supply, to assure even the foundling a 
home and an upbringing. And, perhaps more 
shocking to our minds, was the passion for the 
gladiatorial shows, where men from all parts 
of the world fought each other to death or com- 
bated with wild beasts for the amusement of 
the populace. "The extinction of the gladia- 
torial spectacles," writes Mr. Lecky, "is, of 
all the results of early Christian influence, that 
upon which the historian can look with the 
deepest and most unmingled satisfaction. 
Horrible as was the bloodshed they directly 
caused, these games were perhaps still more 
pernicious on account of the callousness of 
feeling they diffused through all classes, the 



126 THE TEN COMMANDMENTS 



fatal obstacle they presented to any general 
elevation of humanity. Yet the attitude of the 
pagans decisively proves that no progress of 
philosophy or social civilisation was likely, for 
a very long period, to have extirpated them, 
and it can hardly be doubted that, had they 
been flourishing unchallenged as in the days of 
Trajan, when the rude warriors of the North 
obtained the empire of Italy, they would have 
been eagerly adopted by the conquerors, 
would have taken deep root in mediaeval life, 
and have indefinitely retarded the progress of 
humanity. Christianity alone was powerful 
t enough to tear this evil plant from the Roman 
\ soil." We have still a task of the same charac- 
ter to perform in doing away with every exhi- 
bition of brutality for the sake of amusement. 
The present war has vastly increased the in- 
terest in military and naval operations; more 
children than ever are playing soldiers and 
sailors. Most of such play is harmless enough 
and a necessary form of letting children live 
through a section, a pitifully long section, of 
the race's experience ; and most pictures of bat- 
tles will help to increase the loathing we have 
for the whole butcherlike business of blood- 



THE SIXTH COMMANDMENT 127 



shed; but our consciences need to be on the 
alert against anything whatsoever that tends 
to brutalise and render callous the hearts of 
men. Reverence for human beings as children 
of God, to be loved, honoured, served — that is 
the attitude followers of Jesus are set to make 

■ 

universal. 

And as for Christ's own apparently impos- 
sible ideal which excludes an irritated thought 
or expression ; it did not in His own case hinder 
Him from feeling strongly and expressing 
Himself with ample vigour with regard to 
those who stood in the way of the Kingdom 
of love. He called Herod a fox and the Phari- 
sees hypocrites ; He drove the money-changers 
from the Temple with a scourge. But all the 
while one feels that He respected the manhood 
of those He was forced to attack. His very , 
invective is witness of the higher and better ex- 
pectations He cherished of them. Honour 
men sufficiently as children of God, and we can 
speak frankly of that about them in which they 
dishonour themselves. Our peril lies in losing 
the love that believeth and hopeth all things, 
in feeling that some are not worth helping. It 
is this giving up of any man as too trying, or 



128 THE TEN COMMANDMENTS 



too dull, or too bad, that Jesus condemns as 
the violation of the old statute against mur- 
der: "Thou shalt not kill." 

There is still another application of this 
commandment: "Thou shalt not kill thyself." 
Many college debating societies have threshed 
out the question, "Is suicide ever justifiable?" 
We need not discuss the hypothetical question. 
To Christians a man's life is not his own; it 
belongs to God and to those to whom God has 
given him. No man has the right to end it for 
himself. But there are many more ways of 
committing suicide than by cutting one's throat 
or turning on the gas jet. We talk sometimes 
of "killing time"; but during any section of 
time there is an epoch of life, and to kill time is 
to slay some part of self and what self should 
have done. Or we speak of someone as "throw- 
ing himself away"; that which he does is not 
worthy of him, and under such circumstances 
part of a man, and the best part of him, is not 
^ really alive ; he is a partial suicide. Or we say 
of ourselves, excusing our dulness or want 
of poise and patience : "I'm not myself to-day." 
What have we done with our self? There are 
times when physical weakness or nervous 



THE SIXTH COMMANDMENT 129 



strain will make it impossible for us to bring 
our whole mind and heart and will into action; 
but there are often times when the lower ideals 
about us intrude and take possession and we 
are not ourselves. Such intrusions are tem- 
porary suicides ; and the peril is that they may 
become permanent. 

The most tragic figure in Christian history is 
just such a suicide. Judas Iscariot was once| 
man enough to appreciate Jesus of Nazareth. 
He gave Him his sincere loyalty and obedience. 
He went the length of attaching himself to that 
company of devoted men that moved wherever 
the Master went. We have no reason to think 
that Jesus did not welcome and trust him, ex- 
actly as He did the rest. And Judas heard the 
parables which Matthew heard, and watched 
the acts of self -giving kindness which Peter 
saw, and shared the intimate friendship of the 
Master which John knew. But there came 
these intrusions of other ideals, and Judas did 
not close the door to them. Probably his dis- ) 
loyalties were very trifling to begin with — a lit- * 
tie something false here and a small disobedi- 
ence there ; and gradually Jesus saw that Judas 
was no longer himself. And the killing process 



130 THE TEN COMMANDMENTS 

went on until at last we see a desperate man 
knotting a cord about his own neck and making 
his own ghastly end. A man's life consisteth 
not in the things that he possesses, but in that 
which possesses him. To have seen one's high- 
est and not to let it keep complete mastery of 
us, is the road to suicide. To have felt the spell 
of Jesus Christ, to appreciate Him and yield 
Him one's loyalty, but not to let Him keep that 
allegiance completely, leads to self-destruction. 
"Thou shalt not kill." 



THE SEVENTH COMMANDMENT 



THE SEVENTH COMMANDMENT 



Exodus xx:14: "Thou shalt not commit adultery." 

The commandment which safeguards hu- 
man life is followed by this commandment 
which protects the family and asserts the sanc- 
tity of the marriage tie. The connection of the 
two commandments suggests that home is the 
next most sacred thing to life itself. 

In dealing with the Scriptural teaching upon 
marriage it is important that we make clear 
to ourselves in what sense we accept the Bible 
as authoritative. If we consider it, as it is 
widely considered among Protestant Chris- 
tians, a divine book equally inspired in all its 
parts, we shall arrive at a very confused ideal 
of wedded life. At times the Old Testament 
holds up a high standard of what husband and 
wife should mean to each other and condemns 
severely the vice of impurity ; at other times it 
commends, as "after God's own heart," men 
whose lives seem to us profligate, and gives ex- 
plicit teaching that has been used to justify 

133 



134 THE TEN COMMANDMENTS 



Mormonism ; and even the New Testament oc- 
casionally presents a low ideal. If we wish to 
gain a clearly Christian view of marriage, we 
are compelled to take the theory that the 
Bible is the record of the gradual evolution of 
standards, and must be read with discrimi- 
nating eyes that distinguish loftier from lower 
ideals; nor dare we hesitate to affirm that the 
Bible writers are by no means unerring guides, 
but must be corrected by the supreme Chris- 
tian authority — the Spirit of Christ in Chris- 
tian consciences. 

Jesus Himself, in handling the Old Testa- 
ment, said that Moses in his law of divorce had 
compromised the divine intention. And we, 
using our Lord's liberty, must confess that St. 
Paul was not consistent with his own Chris- 
tian principles in treating marriage. We may 
excuse his personal depreciation of wedded life 
by reminding ourselves of the hardships of the 
missionary career that made it inexpedient for 
him, and particularly of his firm belief that the 
world was shortly to end so that home and 
family ties appeared not worth forming; but 
we have to recognise that he never seems to 
have grasped the true union of man and wife 



SEVENTH COMMANDMENT 135 



as comrades in faith and purpose. Instead of 
abiding by his own statement that men and 
women are equal in Christ, he is bound by his 
traditional Pharisaic theology that man is su- 
perior to woman, because man was made di- 
rectly in God's image, while woman was only 
copied from man. Instead of summing up the 
wife's obligation to be, like the husband's, to 
love (although Paul himself believed that love 
was the fulfilling of the law), he insists that it 
is to obey. 

While the Bible, when read with critical 
discrimination, contains valuable teaching on 
this subject, the Christian ideal is stated satis- 
factorily only in Jesus Himself. He is con- 
vinced that marriage is normally the divine 
purpose: "Have ye not read that He who 
made them from the beginning made them 
male and female, and said, a man shall cleave 
to his wife ; and the two shall become one flesh." 
He swept His keen eye over the convictions 
of the past and the experiences of men and 
women around Him, and recognised marriage 
as the necessary completion and enrichment of 
the normal life. But He saw that there were 
exceptions. Under a metaphor that sounds 



136 THE TEN COMMANDMENTS 



coarse to our modern ears, and was not meant 
by Him to be taken literally, He speaks of 
some as constitutionally not adapted for mar- 
riage, and of others as deliberately remaining 
single for the Kingdom's sake. In the latter 
class He may have been thinking of John the 
Baptist, or of some of His own disciples ; or He 
may be giving us a bit of autobiography and 
uncovering His own personal decision. And 
it is significant that this choice seemed to Him 
a great sacrifice. He appreciated so fully the 
glory of the companionship of true husband 
and wife, that to forego marriage was to Him 
an heroic demand justified only by exceptional 
circumstances: "He that is able to receive it, 
let him receive it." 

And because He prized the wedded tie so 
highly any breach of it by divorce was intol- 
erable to Him. "What, therefore, God hath 
joined together, let not man put asunder." The 
exception which the Gospel of Matthew inserts 
in His saying almost certainly does not come 
from Him, but was an interpretation of His 
teaching for practical use in the Church of the 
second generation. Jesus did not lay down 
a law to be enacted by legislatures, nor even 



SEVENTH COMMANDMENT 137 



by Church courts; He held up the Christian 
ideal for his followers. 

Unfortunately His teaching is much oftener 
appealed to in discussions on divorce than on 
marriage. His own interest is in the establish- 
ment of a divine relation between husband and 
wife — "those whom God hath joined together." 
Jesus was an enthusiast for man; He saw 
more in human beings than any one ever saw 
before Him ; He believed us capable of higher 
things than anyone else dared to believe: "Ye 
shall be perfect as your heavenly Father is 
perfect." So He believed that human rela- 
tions could be made divinely ideal. Marriage 
was the union of man and woman in all their 
godlike capacities; they must be joined to- 
gether in body, mind, conscience and faith, or 
they were not united by God. 

The prevalent agitation against the increas- 
ing evil of broken homes usually concerns itself 
with the wrong end of the problem. We need 
not so much a new conscience about divorce as 
about marriage. 

Many marriages are matters of calculation ; 
wife or husband is considered a desirable con- 
venience. A man may be anxious to have a 



138 THE TEN COMMANDMENTS 



home of his own, or may feel himself lonely, or 
may think marriage would help him in his 
business, or may want somebody to care for his 
comforts; a woman may want greater freedom 
than is usually accorded an unmarried girl, or 
may be eager to leave the parental home, or 
may wish to be supported, or may feel a certain 
reproach that foolishly attaches to girls who 
remain single beyond a certain age, or may 
have a craving for motherhood. None of these 
motives is bad in itself ; but none is an adequate 
reason for marriage. In a recent study of the 
Bronte sisters is an interesting proposal that 
was made to Charlotte Bronte. It came from 
her best friend's brother, a Church of England 
curate, who had made up his mind that he ought 
to secure a wife. He first asked the daughter 
of his former vicar, whom in his diary he char- 
acterises as "a steady, intelligent, sensible and, 
I trust, good girl named Mary." She refused 
him, and he enters in his diary "On Tuesday 
last received a decisive reply from M. A. L.'s 
papa; a loss, but I trust a providential one. 
Believe not her will but her father's. Write 
to a Yorkshire friend, C. B." Shortly after 
occurs the record, "Received an unfavourable 



SEVENTH COMMANDMENT 139 



reply from C. B. The will of the Lord be 
done." If the man had only been anything 
like as anxious and intelligent in trying to do 
God's will in seeking a wife, as in accepting 
piously his well-merited refusals, there might 
have been some chance of his forming a Chris- 
tian marriage. What true union of heart with 
heart, purpose with purpose, could there be in 
such matter-of-fact proposing with no more 
apparent feeling than is usually displayed in 
visiting an intelligence office? 

Or at the other extreme, marriages are made 
by an unthinking sentimental attraction. Dr. 
Johnson, in his now seldom read romance, 
Rasselas, writes: "A youth and a maiden, 
meeting by chance or brought together by 
artifice, exchange glances, reciprocate civilities, 
go home and dream of each other. Having 
little to divert attention or diversify thought, 
they find themselves uneasy apart, and there- 
fore conclude that they shall be happy together. 
They marry and discover what nothing but 
voluntary blindness before had concealed." 
Judgment, as well as sentiment, must be 
wedded. Our much freer American way of 
letting young people meet and see much of 



140 THE TEN COMMANDMENTS 



each other is a long step towards helping them 
to find out whether, besides sentimental attrac- 
tion, they are intelligently drawn together in 
purpose and conscience. 

Worst of all, perhaps, is the marriage en- 
tered upon because man or woman resolves 
to be married. Girls sometimes are in love 
with the idea of being in love; men marry 
because they make up their minds to marry. In 
the biography of Tschaikowsky, the Russian 
composer, we are told that he had a genuine 
love affair with an opera singer who chose to 
marry another man. Afterwards he wrote to 
his brother: "I have decided to marry; this is 
irrevocable," and again, "I have been thinking 
of my future ; the result is my firm resolution 
to enter into the state of matrimony with some- 
one or other." The following May he became 
engaged to a girl who had fallen in love with 
him. He told her he could not love her; but 
would be a devoted friend; he described his 
character in detail — his irritability, his change- 
able temperament, his antipathy to people, 
his financial condition; and asked her to be- 
come his wife. She accepted, and after a few 
unhappy months they separated. The musi- 



SEVENTH COMMANDMENT 141 

cian wrote: "A few days more and I swear 
I would have gone insane." There was no 
quarrel; the composer struggled, as he writes, 
to recognise all her good qualities, and she 
prepared a home for him which he liked and 
occupied for a short time. The biographer 
simply tells us that there was "an abyss of mis- 
understandings between the two." 

A Christian marriage occurs only when two 
lives touch completely. It has in it the vehe- 
mence and fervour and tenderness, which we 
sum up in the special sense of our most sacred 
word "love." The passion may come grad- 
ually or suddenly, but it brings always an ex- 
perience so transforming that it seems a second 
birth. A new world comes into being for 
lovers. We may think them blind to each 
other's faults, but it is only because love has 
opened their eyes to see in each other what 
none else, save God Himself, can see. They 
idealise each other; but that idealisation is 
love's way of reaching and bringing out the 
real self within. They honour each other su- 
premely; each is incomparable to the other's 
mind. In each other they find themselves, as 
they never found themselves before. A Chris- 




142 THE TEN COMMANDMENTS 

tian can never find himself in another unless 
the other possesses at least the capacity for his 
loyalties, his ideals, his faith. Lives that touch 
at a number of points, but remain utterly re- 
mote at what is to one the supreme point, are 
not divinely joined together. Paul had insight 
enough to urge that Christians marry "in the 
Lord" — both lives controlled by the Spirit of 
Jesus. The Old Testament saying, our Lord 
singled out as descriptive of man's attitude to- 
wards God, is none too strong to describe the 
attitude of Christian husband and wife: they 
must love with all their heart, soul, mind and 
strength. So, and only so, does God, who is 
love, join them together. 

To be sure the peculiar intensity of the first 
affection that unites them may not remain 
constantly. The routine of life which man and 
wife must share will expose in each many un- 
lovely qualities. They may begin to question 
whether, after all, they may not have made a 
mistake, whether they really love each other. 
But love is for Christians loyalty. God loves 
us not because we are invariably attractive to 
Him — far from it; He loves us because He 
once idealised us, saw our possibilities as His 



SEVENTH COMMANDMENT 143 



children, and remains true to that insight, de- 
spite all we do to the contrary. It is a tragic 
situation when husband or wife must live for 
years holding fast to a gleam from the past that 
never seems to shine again in the companion 
of to-day; but that is the loyalty required of 
Christian love; it is the loyalty of Christ to 
us, and it is the loyalty of His God and Father. 

And a loyalty that will go all lengths is 
needed to take husband and wife the much 
shorter distances of mutual concession and for- 
giveness and patience, that must be travelled 
even by those whose lives seem supremely 
happy. None of us is always at his best ; most 
of us come anywhere near it only at rare inter- 
vals. Temper is but partially in control; 
everyone is unreasonable about some things; 
each has a full stock of foibles and weaknesses 
that must be borne with; there are numerous 
chances for wills to clash, even for consciences 
to differ. A love that has to be kept alive by 
the attractiveness, or even by the responding 
affection of the other, will not suffice ; love must 
have loyalty within itself that is independent 
of present stimulus or response. And there 
may come experiences when it will be called 



144 THE TEN COMMANDMENTS 



on to bear, believe, hope, endure all things; 
that is love's lot in our world. And only a 
love that is capable of an immeasurable loyalty 
to the ideal self, which it has once seen and 
known and honoured, is adequate for the 
strain. To such love the breaking of the re- 
lation will be as intolerable as to Jesus Him- 
self. That is Christian marriage. Of man and 
woman so united we can say "What God hath 
joined together." 

The extent to which it is feasible or desirable 
to make legislation enforce on an entire popu- 
lation the Christian ideal is a very complex 
question. When so many men and women 
marry for motives that make it impossible to 
say that they are united by God, it becomes a 
question of expediency to determine under 
what circumstances man may, and perhaps 
ought, to put them asunder. In this country 
we are suffering from an overdeveloped and 
undisciplined individualism. People feel that 
they can marry as they please, and ought not 
to be held together if the bond seems irksome. 
Much nonsense is talked about the cruelty of 
enforced self-suppression. No one ever finds 
himself until he loses himself for a larger 



SEVENTH COMMANDMENT 145 



whole ; and society must be held up before peo- 
ple's consciences as of more importance than 
their personal happiness or comfort or con- 
venience. 

Obviously the State must do its best to safe- 
guard marriage, and insist that it is a privilege 
open only to those who possess reasonable 
health and intelligence, and enter upon it with 
proper deliberation; but legislation can pro- 
duce but clumsy contrivances when the real 
fitness is a matter of heart. Wljen^ba^i^.to 
marriage are enacted, corre^pon^n^vg^tes are 
opened Jbo immorality. Probably none oFUs 
would wish a more stringent divorce law than 
that which stands on the statutes of New York 
at present ; many think it too stringent. There 
should be uniform laws throughout our land, 
for it is absurd to have that which is illegal 
in one state made legal for those who have 
sufficient money to travel to another. But we 
dare not hope for very much from legislation. 
We must rely on spreading the Christian social 
conscience, the conscience that in loyalty to 
children will endure almost everything from 
their father or mother ; and, where the endur- 
ance point is past, will certainly not ask for 



146 THE TEN COMMANDMENTS 

more than separation; the conscience that in 
loyalty to that which love has once revered will 
be willing to suffer and wait and hope for 
years, and to forgive with the amazing forgive- 
ness of that Old Testament prophet who took 
back his wife, and the mother of his children, 
after she had spent years in a life of shame. 
We are far from that social conscience yet; 
but as Christians we must set our eyes toward 
it for ourselves and our land. 
V Nor is it easy to determine to what extent 
the Church should try to put into her rules the 
ideal of Jesus. The Gospel of Matthew shows 
how very early the Church felt impelled to 
adapt the ideal to circumstances. Our Lord 
has not left us a fixed law, but a living Spirit. 
When a marriage has been irreparably broken, 
and we are dealing with the person who seems 
to have been more sinned against than sinning, 
and when no injustice is being done to children 
and the ideal of marriage itself is not being 
flouted and degraded, it is a fair question 
whether it is the mind of the Spirit of Christ 
not to further and bless a second attempt to 
establish a true wedded life. Shall we say 
that the evangelist who adapted the words of 



SEVENTH COMMANDMENT 147 



Jesus to the Church situation of his day was 
not inspired by the Spirit of the Master? And 
has not the Church of to-day the same right to 
be freely led by the same Spirit? Our main 
task is to train Christians who will not marry 
save when so divinely impelled that of them we 
have a right to say: "What God hath joined 
together let not man put asunder." But, in 
a world of imperfect knowledge and faulty 
consciences, it may be also the Church's duty 
to help the bitterly disappointed and cruelly 
abused to realise the divine ideal in a second 
attempt at marriage, when the first has proved 
a hopeless failure. 

Jesus gave this ancient commandment an in- 
terpretation all His own when He told His 
followers that for us an impure look or thought 
was to be shunned as adultery. And Jesus 
has succeeded in giving the world in His faith 
and ideals its strongest purifying force. Ori- 
gen, centuries ago, could answer the objections 
of the heathen Celsus by appealing to well 
known facts : "The work of Jesus," he wrote, 
"reveals itself among all mankind where com- 
munities of God founded by Jesus exist, 
which are composed of men reclaimed from a 



148 THE TEN COMMANDMENTS 



thousand vices; and to this day the name of 
J esus produces decency of manners." We have 
constant need to insist on that decency. Chris- 
tians cannot be too careful in refusing to pa- 
tronise amusements, or to have anything to 
do with papers or books, that are not absolutely 
clean. Information about all sorts of disgust- 
ing vices is not conducive to pure thinking. 



igre^are^sojme things we can well afford to 



even be named among you as becometh those 
set apart." 

A recent teacher has followed Christ's 
method of applying an ugly word to what 
many of us are tempted to think trivial, in 
order to bring home to our consciences its in- 
trinsic evil. Dr. Cabot of Boston has pointed 
out that the essential sin in prostitution is 
treating a person impersonally — as a mere 
thing. And he wishes us to label all im- 
personal treatment of people prostitution. 
How widespread that sin is among the most 
respectable! The relation of employers and 
employed are often impersonal — housekeepers 
think of a maid merely as cook or waitress, not 




SEVENTH COMMANDMENT 149 



as a sister in the family of God with aspira- 
tions, feelings, ideals, convictions; manu- 
facturers regard those who sit at their 
machines as so many hands, and make no 
effort to deal with them as minds and con- 
sciences and souls ; employees regard their em- 
ployer or foreman merely as "the boss," with 
no consideration for the man; all of us accept 
a great quantity of services from a number of 
people without letting any outgo of ourselves 
reach them. This is as essentially prostitution, 
as the impure thought is adultery; it is the 
degradation of personality. We can all feel 
whether we are dealt with as persons or as 
things — mere factors in the convenience or 
advance or life-background of another. And 
what we feel, others can feel in their dealings 
with us. Purity between lives is safeguarded 
only by reverence for the child of God in every 
man and woman. The shame of thousands of 
women in our own city is but the outcome of 
the impurity of heart that fails to personalise 
every touch of life with life. And who of us 
is guiltless? 

For us, believing men and women, the glory 
of human wedlock shines most brilliantly 



150 THE TEN COMMANDMENTS 



when we use it, as generations of believers 
have used it before us, as a symbol of God's 
relationship to man. "Thy Maker is thy 
Husband." For the divine union exalts and 
sanctifies the human tie. "Christ loved the 
Church and gave Himself for it that He might 
present it to Himself a glorious Church, not 
having spot or wrinkle or any such thing, 
even so ought husbands to love their wives," 
writes a Christian apostle. It was God's mer- 
ciful and unalterably loyal love for His peo- 
ple that led Hosea to forgive and take back 
Gomer, his faithless wife. The divine Hus- 
band became an irresistible ideal for the human 
husband. We take all the wealth we have 
discovered in our richest home experiences, 
and let it be to us a suggestion of what we may 
expect from God. We think of the devotion, 
the patience, the tenderness, the trust, the alle- 
giance, given us by our nearest and dearest; and 
we look up to the heavens in faith and expect 
nothing less, when we say to ourselves, "God 
is love." And so far from failing us, we dis- 
cover that our highest anticipations, based on 
human affection, are too small. God outdoes 
man's or woman's best ; and he sends husband 



SEVENTH COMMANDMENT 151 



and wife back from their experience of Him 
to fill the cup of their mutual obligations with 
a fuller measure, because of the overflowing 
heart they have found in Him. We learn 
love's meaning first in our most tender human 
relations; but the highest definition these give 
us proves inadequate when we try to put into 
it all that God's devotion means to us. 
"Hereby perceive we love, because He laid 
down His life for us." The Calvary of long 
ago o'ertops the loftiest summit of devotion 
we know anywhere else. And from our ex- 
perience of divine redeeming love we draw in- 
spirations for that tender loyalty which crowns 
the union of man and wife. 



THE EIGHTH COMMANDMENT 



THE EIGHTH COMMANDMENT 



Exodus xx: 15: "Thou shalt not steal." 

The Decalogue runs in a suggestive se- 
quence; one after another follow command- 
ments safeguarding life, family, property. It 
surprises some to find the sanctity of posses- 
sions placed beside the sanctity of life and 
home. Religion is interested not in things but 
in persons; yes, but property is essential to 
persons. No man can realise his personality . 
without possessions. Just as marriage is held 
sacred for the sake of persons for whose per- 
fecting home is necessary, property is pro- 
tected because of its value for the characters 
of men. Like life itself, property is indispens- 
able to train human beings into true children of 
God. 

Two fundamental religious convictions un- 
derlie the Bible's attitude towards possessions. 
The first is that all things belong to God, and 
their human owners hold them only as His 
representatives for the time being. When 

155 



156 THE TEN COMMANDMENTS 



David passes over to Solomon the materials he 
has collected for the building of the Temple, 
he is represented as saying: "Thine, O Lord, 
is the greatness, for all that is in the heaven 
and in the earth is Thine. Both riches and 
honour come of Thee, and Thou rulest over 
all ; and in Thine hand it is to make great and 
to give strength unto all. All this store that 
we have prepared to build Thee an house for 
Thine holy name cometh of Thine hand, and is 
Thine own. O Lord, keep this forever in the 
imagination of the thoughts of the heart of 
Thy people, and establish their heart unto 
Thee." This prayer connects God's owner- 
ship with the fleeting character of human life: 
"For we are strangers before Thee, and so- 
journers, as all our fathers were," so that man's 
proprietorship of anything must be temporary. 
"We brought nothing into this world, neither 
can we carry anything out." God's it was, and 
His it remains. As Job said when possessions 
and family were gone: "The Lord gave and 
the Lord hath taken away." 

The second is that God gives the earth to 
mankind as a family, and it is therefore family 
property: "The earth hath He given to the. 



EIGHTH COMMANDMENT 157 



children of men." The Old Testament horizon 
is limited usually to Israel; all possessions be- 
long to the nation, and each Israelite is en- 
titled to his share in the national heritage. In 
theory a man's land could not be taken in per- 
petuity from him and his, but must be returned 
in the Year of Jubilee. In order to remind 
owners that their fields were not primarily 
theirs but the nation's, they were bidden not to 
reap their harvests thoroughly, but to leave 
the gleanings for the poor. When economic 
pressure created a landless and dependent 
class, the prophets protested that the religious 
ideal of brotherhood was infringed upon : "Je- 
hovah will enter into judgment with the elders 
and princes of His people. It is ye that have 
eaten up the vineyard ; the spoil of the poor is 
in your houses. What mean ye that ye crush 
my people, and grind the face of the poor?" 
and again, "Woe unto those who join house to 
house, who add field to field, till there is no 
more room, and ye are settled alone in the 
midst of the land." Their indignation is not 
so much that a few have amassed great wealth, 
although there are protests against wasteful 
luxury and display, but that many of the peo- 



158 THE TEN COMMANDMENTS 



pie are without property, and the possession- 
less cannot develop morally as they would had 
they their share in the national domain. After 
the Exile Nehemiah insists that the well-to-do 
shall restore to every Israelite his small an- 
cestral holding, so that none shall be without 
the means to have a home and a livelihood. 

The New Testament discloses these two con- 
victions firmly imbedded in Christian minds, 
but God's fatherhood of all men takes away 
the barriers that usually confined Old Testa- 
ment thought to Israel. Earth and its contents 
is the Father's house with bread enough and 
to spare for His children. God gives men all 
things richly to enjoy, so that they are meant 
to possess and take pleasure in things. Jesus' 
personal poverty has been over-emphasised; 
for the greater part of His adult life He 
worked as a carpenter, and enjoyed a comfort- 
able home in Nazareth ; and although later His 
special task prevented Him from following a 
remunerative calling, He gladly accepted the 
hospitality of the relatively wealthy, lived in 
some disciple's house in Capernaum, and re- 
ceived the gifts of generous and grateful ad- 
herents. He heartily delighted in life's good 



EIGHTH COMMANDMENT 159 



things, so that critics found a basis for calling 
Him glutton and winebibber. 

In His teaching, too, men are to recognise 
that the title to things is vested primarily in 
the brotherhood, whose collective prayer is, 
"Give us this day our daily bread." No Chris- 
tian is expected to ask for himself what he 
does not as eagerly seek for everybody else. 
So strong was this sense of brotherhood in the 
early days of Christian enthusiasm that men 
freely placed their possessions at the disposal 
of the Christian community. No one was com- 
pelled to give up his property, and his right to 
keep it was recognised; "While it remained," 
Peter says to Ananias about his possession, 
"did it not remain thine own and after it was 
sold, was it not in thy power?" There was no 
deliberately planned communism; but, moved 
by the spirit of brotherhood, "none said that 
aught of the things which he possessed was 
his own"; and, in that sense, "they had all 
things common." 

Jesus laid stress on two principles connected 
with the tenure of property. One was that 
His followers' hearts must be detached from 
things: "A man's life consisteth not in the 



160 THE TEN COMMANDMENTS 



abundance of things which he possesseth." It 
was that detachment rather than a love of pov- 
erty that made Him urge the young ruler to 
sell all that he had. Riches are in His mind 
perils; they are apt to render their possessors 
self-sufficient, self-important, self-indulgent — 
the opposite of the spirit which rules in the 
Kingdom of Heaven. A man with large wealth 
almost invariably trusts in it to help him 
through crises, instead of putting his confi- 
dence in something higher. He is likely to be- 
come domineering, because many persons defer 
to him, and to feel that his wealth entitles his 
opinion to consideration. He is under great 
pressure to indulge himself, to think much of 
his own comfort, pleasure, convenience, and 
to be unbraced for daily personal sacrifice and 
hard labour. Jesus emphasises the danger in 
the striking metaphor: "It is easier for a 
camel to go through a needle's eye than for a 
rich man to enter the kingdom of God." Of 
which passage Coleridge once wrote: "Often 
as the motley reflexes of my experience move 
in long processions of manifold groups before 
me, the distinguished and world-honoured com- 
pany of Christian Mammonials appear to the 



EIGHTH COMMANDMENT 161 



eye of my imagination as a drove of camels 
heavily laden, yet all at full speed, and each in 
the confident expectation of passing through 
the eye of the needle, without stop or halt, both 
beast and baggage." 

The other principle is that of stewardship of 
everything that a man possesses. Whatever 
a Christian owns must be used for the service 
of human need, through which alone he serves 
his Lord: "Inasmuch as ye did it unto one of 
these My brethren, ye did it unto Me." Ob- 
viously Jesus presupposes that a Christian has 
some private property; if there were nothing 
which he called his own, what could he use in 
the service of the brotherhood as their trustee 
under God? Jesus, no less than the Old Testa- 
ment, considered property necessary to the at- 
tainment of personality as a child of God. 
When St. Paul is handling a thief, he tells him 
first to labour that he may have; the possession 
of property is essential to training his con- 
science in responsibility. And second, he is to 
labour to have that he may give to him that is 
in need. The thief's Christian training is not 
complete until he is serving the brotherhood. 
And such service is not charity in the sense of 



162 THE TEN COMMANDMENTS 



gratuitous generosity on the part of the giver ; 
it is justice, for possessors owe their brethren 
whatever they need, so far as it lies in their 
power to meet that need. "Whoso hath the 
world's goods, and beholdeth his brother in 
need, and shutteth up his compassion from him, 
how doth the love of God abide in him?" 

To sum up, from the Christian point of view 
all property belongs primarily to God, and sec- 
ondarily to society as the family of God, whose 
duty it is to see that each child of the Father 
has a share of his own in the family heritage, 
which he is to use as his Father's steward for 
the needs of the family, recognising their claim 
upon him and his. 

In that summary, there are three sets of du- 
ties — God's, society's, the individual's. Let us 
examine them in order. 

1. God as Father is under obligation to 
provide for His children, and to see to it that 
there is enough in His world for everybody. 
As Christians we believe that God can be re- 
lied on to do His duty. When we pray, "Give 
us this day our daily bread," we are confident 
that He answers with a supply sufficient for 
His whole household. If it be in His power 



EIGHTH COMMANDMENT 163 



and He fails to provide for us, we can say to 
Him: "Thou shalt not steal." He lays no 
duties on our consciences which He does not 
lay upon His own, for He asks us to be per- 
fect as He is perfect. If, then, there is want, 
we must put it down to our bad management, 
not to a genuine lack. We are not encouraged 
to pray: "Give us this day our daily cake"; 
it is not a wise father's part to pamper his 
children; but we are encouraged to ask with as- 
surance for bread for all, our bread. Many 
economists go on the assumption that large 
masses of men must live on the verge of starva- 
tion always ; and most of us are brought up to 
believe that want is the inevitable lot of 
millions. Wealth and poverty are, to be sure, 
relative terms, and there will always be richer 
and poorer people ; but no Christian can assent 
to the notion that earth is so constituted that 
many must necessarily be nearly starving. 
That would argue a niggardly God, and we 
believe in One who openeth His hand and sat- 
isfieth the desire of every living thing. In a 
world where sickness, accident and death are 
present we shall always have the poor with us, 
as J esus said ; but poverty, in the sense of ac- 



164 THE TEN COMMANDMENTS 



tual want among the well and capable, must 
always appear to the Christian as a human 
blunder and sin, man's defeat of God's inten- 
tion. 

2. It is society's duty to see that each indi- 
vidual born into the world has a portion of the 
family heritage that he can call his own. This 
in the eyes of the Bible writers is a religious 
necessity. A man without private property 
cannot serve God through his fellow men, for 
he lacks the means adequately to express him- 
self. A certain amount of things is needed for 
self -attainment. The great movement which 
begins Israel's history was a labour movement 
on the part of people who felt that as slaves 
without possessions they could not . exercise 
their religion. "The Lord spake unto Moses, 
Go in unto Pharaoh, and say unto him, Thus 
saith the Lord, Let My people go, that they 
may serve Me" The divine plan for humanity 
is the education of men into independent and 
reliant sons of God; that cannot be so long 
as they are economically dependent. If a man 
is a slave, whose work or idleness is not in his 
own power, who has no chance to use his con- 
science in his labour, and cannot express his 



EIGHTH COMMANDMENT 165 



personality in initiative, in perseverance, in 
thrift, in loving service, he is hindered from at- 
taining Christian manhood. And Israel, born 
into national life in this struggle for industrial 
freedom, took care to safeguard in its laws 
each man's right to work, and to protect him in 
the possession of his tools : "No man shall take 
the mill or the upper mill-stone to pledge; for 
he taketh a man's life to pledge." That with 
which a man earns his living must be as sa- 
credly kept his, as the community protects his 
life. Unless a man is assured his chance to 
work and the means with which to work, there 
is no guarantee that he can keep any private 
property, and private property is essential to 
his life in fellowship with God. 

Under modern conditions it is by no means 
easy to devise a system by which society can 
secure each man his chance to work and guar- 
antee his owning something. When a man 
earns his living by operating a machine, or 
working in a mine, or selling goods over a 
counter, or keeping books in an office, which 
belongs to others, it is not so simple to safe- 
guard his chance to labour, as when he merely 
had to be protected from the loss of a couple of 



166 THE TEN COMMANDMENTS 



millstones. The Bible sets forth no economic 
programme, and all attempts to read into it 
socialism or communism, or any other indus- 
trial theory are mistaken ; but it lays down re- 
ligious principles which each age must use its 
conscience and intelligence to embody in the 
social organisation of its day. And it is our 
duty as Christians to appreciate that private 
property is indispensable to religion, that no 
man can be a steward save as he can call some- 
thing his own, and that this private tenure of 
possessions is not secure save as men and 
women are guaranteed the means and oppor- 
tunity to labour. The Christian criticism of 
things as they are is not that a few have vast 
4 possessions, but that far too many have none. 
Men and women of large means can be trained 
to be good stewards, although a large fortune 
constitutes a very serious problem for its pos- 
sessor, and we ought to recognise that, as a 
Christian, he faces one of the hardest tasks 
allotted to any man. But persons with noth- 
* ing cannot be trained in responsibility. It is 
difficult to give them a share in the civic con- 
science. Possessing no stake in the country, 
they do not feel an obligation for its welfare, 



EIGHTH COMMANDMENT 167 



and having nothing to lose, they welcome any 
change and are always open-eared for radical 
agitation. Furthermore, Christianity has little 
meaning for them, and its adherents appear 
to them hypocrites. It inculcates brotherhood ; 
but where for them is there brotherliness in a 
community, rich in possessions and opportuni- 
ties, that offers them no sure chance to earn 
a living and maintain for themselves and theirs 
a home ? It proclaims that God is Father, and 
His fatherliness is to be known in His care 
for His children; but where can they feel God's 
personal interest in them when they have no 
lot in the family inheritance? 

Christ nowhere teaches that all men are to 
have equal shares of anything; His parable of 
the talents presupposes an uneven distribution 
of possessions; but under existing conditions 
far too many have no part at all in the house- \ 
hold's goods. A child born into a Christian 
world must be assured the chance to labour that 
he may Inave, that he may give. Until society 
secures the right to private property for every 
sane and healthy man and woman, we are steal- 
ing from them, depriving them of their due 
share in God's endowment of the family of 



168 THE TEN COMMANDMENTS 



man. And society needs to be told, "Thou 
shalt not steal." 

Further, it is society's duty to insist that no 
possessor shall employ his means in a way that 
is harmful to the general good. It must im- 
press on every private owner that his property 
is primarily the family's ; and that it is his only 
in so far as his control of it is for the family's 
interest. We allow a man to build his own 
house, and accord him fullest liberty in de- 
signing and arranging it that he may express 
his individuality; but we insist that its plans 
shall not violate the fire laws or menace the 
public health. We face in the social control 
of private property the delicate problem of 
affording the individual sufficient liberty to ex- 
press his unique self (and that must imply 
freedom to do a good many things that seem 
to conventional minds foolish or even wicked) , 
while we safeguard the interests of society as 
a whole. 

There are wide differences of opinion be- 
tween those who lay the stress on social rights 
and those who emphasise individual freedom. 
As Christians we have no ready-made solution 
to offer; the proper harmony of both prin- 



EIGHTH COMMANDMENT 169 



ciples will doubtless take us a long while to 
establish, exactly as in political organisation 
we are slowly harmonising vigorous personal 
initiative on the part of leaders and private 
citizens with adequate democratic control. But 
as Christians we must hold up the two prin- 
ciples: society's duty to accord every man 
private property for self-expression as a child 
of God, and society's duty to insist that each 
child recognise the prior claims of the whole 
family and use his property for the well-being 
of his brethren. 

3. The individual's duty is first of all to re- 
member that whatever he owns is given him by 
God through society. We could own nothing, 
except by our sheer physical force to take and 
keep it, were it not for the community's pro- 
tection of our rights through its laws. And if 
we are allowed the use and enjoyment of pos- 
sessions, it is because we are presumed to em- 
ploy them for the good of the brotherhood. A 
man's income, and all that it enables him to 
purchase, is in a very real sense a salary paid 
him by society for the services that he is sup- 
posed to render. It makes no difference how 
that income comes to him, whether through in- 



170 THE TEN COMMANDMENTS 



herited wealth, or the labour of others, or 
through his own efforts ; it is a portion of the 
family's riches placed at his disposal, and so- 
ciety is justified in making that outlay on him 
only in so far as he makes a commensurate re- 
turn in usefulness to his brethren. 

It is a searching and sobering question for 
our consciences whether you and I are worth 
our keep to the family of God. We must to- 
tal up what it costs to feed, clothe, educate, 
house, amuse, inspire us; and ask ourselves 
whether we perform an adequate service in 
view of the salary society allows us. There 
are many of us who are freed from laborious 
drudgery because others attend to this for us. 
We are released from the hardest physical 
strain and the dirtiest and most disagreeable 
labour, while others remain hewers of wood and 
drawers of water — fishermen braving the perils 
and exposures of winter off the banks of New- 
foundland, lonely lightship-keepers tossing 
day and night on the waves, drivers of the gar- 
bage wagons in our city streets, "sandhogs" 
subjected to the diseases and confined to the 
unpleasant surroundings of toil underground 
and under our rivers. Is our release from 



EIGHTH COMMANDMENT 171 



such tasks justified by the beneficent achieve- 
ments of our liberated time and energy? If 
one rides in an automobile, while the majority 
of his fellow-citizens are compelled to use less 
swift and comfortable means of transit, his 
contribution to the public good must be cor- 
respondingly greater, or society is not war- 
ranted in the larger expenditure it is accord- 
ing him. For everything that we use or en-j 
joy — the clothes on our backs, the comforts 
of our dwellings, the leisure at our disposal, 
the amusements that entertain us, the intel- 
lectual stimulus and training given us, the re- 
ligious inspirations we receive — we must make 
a corresponding payment in service to the fam- 
ily of God's children. "Thou shalt not steal." 

In thinking of our income, we are entitled to 
distinguish between what we spend upon our- 
selves and what we devote to the service of 
others. We can leave the latter aside for the 
moment; it is what we use for ourselves and 
our families, for food, rent, pleasures, educa- 
tion, inspiration, that is society's salary to us 
for personal services rendered. If we are not 
worth that before the bar of our consciences, 
there is nothing for us but to curtail our ex- 



172 THE TEN COMMANDMENTS 



penses. To spend more than one really earns 
is just thieving, and it must be labelled by its 
proper name. No law may lay its hand upon 
us, and hale us to a court, and place us behind 
prison bars with striped clothing; but the 
stripes are there in the eyes of a just God, and 
will more and more appear to the eyes of the 
enlightened consciences of men. 

What we set aside for gifts to public causes 
is society's trust to our wisdom and conscience 
to expend in its name, and in God's name, from 
whom society's wealth comes. It behooves us 
to look carefully at the sources of this wealth. 
No Christian wishes to be generous with money 
that has been gained by underpaying the la- 
bour of those who produced it, or by selling 
goods of a character or at a price that made 
their sale no genuine public service. Under 
present circumstances conscience has to func- 
tion at long range, and go far afield to post it- 
self upon the conditions under which wealth is 
produced. It does not matter whether we meas- 
ure our income in millions or in a very few dol- 
lars, we cannot escape the obligation of inquir- 
ing how it is created. Thou shalt not steal, 
even when the theft is unintentional; and no 



EIGHTH COMMANDMENT 173 



sanctification of money by its dedication to the 
holiest uses can remove the social wrong of its 
unjust acquisition. 

In the gifts which a Christian makes out of 
that which is his own by God's gift through 
society, he has the final perfecting of his char- 
acter through his possessions. That is a strik- 
ing saying of our Lord's, "Make to yourselves 
friends by means of the mammon of unright- 
eousness ; that, when it shall fail, they may re- 
ceive you into the eternal tabernacles." In a 
world as yet so imperfect as ours no money is 
gained in entire brotherliness ; the best business 
is doubtless harsh and unkind to someone, so 
that its earnings may be called "mammon of 
unrighteousness." Christ bids us take it and 
employ it to make friends, to establish relations 
of helpfulness between ourselves and those 
who need what we have; and adds that these 
relations will persist in the final and lasting 
order of things. We began by insisting that 
property was essential for developing person- 
ality ; here Christ is pleading that we shall turn 
property into personal relations, for people 
last, while things perish. We grow our char- 
acters not in contact with things but with other 



174 THE TEN COMMANDMENTS 



men; property becomes a means of enlarging 
ourselves only as it makes those selves touch 
helpfully other selves. 

Into what sort of friendships are we putting 
our mammon of unrighteousness? There is a 
friendship for men that expresses itself in 
kindness for their bodies; and Christians will 
certainly not be slower than others to give to 
relieve the physical wants of the hungry and 
the sick. There is a still higher friendship 
with them that brings us into touch with their 
minds ; and Christians have not been remiss in 
giving liberally to the institutions that educate 
and train intelligence and skill, or that supply 
wholesome pleasures. But we must recognise 
to-day that there are many persons without 
distinctive Christian convictions who are will- 
ing to be friends of the bodies and minds of 
their brethren, but who will go no farther — 
possibly because they are not certain of any- 
thing more within themselves that they can 
offer in friendship. This leaves us, believers 
in the faith of Jesus, with a special duty to be- 
friend the spirits, the consciences of our 
brethren. We should not be content to see 
them comfortable and clever, but no more; 



EIGHTH COMMANDMENT 175 



healthy in body and rich in intellect, but pau- 
pers in character. We must present ourselves 
to be friends of their faith by dedicating our 
gifts that none of God's children, here at our 
side in our own land or at the ends of the earth, 
shall be strangers to our most enriching Friend. 
It is as Christ's mutual friends that we shall 
come closest to each other and go most deeply 
into each other's hearts. And in such friend- 
ship, whether we see each other face to face in 
the flesh or not, we are already sharing eternal 
tabernacles, abiding together in the secret place 
of the Most High, and occupying mansions in 
the one Father's everlasting house. 



THE NINTH COMMANDMENT 



THE NINTH COMMANDMENT 



Exodus xx:16: "Thou shalt not bear false witness 
against thy neighbour." 

Every community has to take measures to 
insure the truthfulness of witnesses before its 
courts, and perjury is everywhere punished 
among civilised men. One of Israel's codes 
contains the following enactment: "If the 
witness be a false witness, and have testified 
falsely against his brother; then shall ye do 
unto him as he had thought to do unto his 
brother; so shalt thou put away evil from the 
midst of thee. And those that remain shall 
hear, and fear, and shall henceforth commit 
no more any such evil in the midst of thee. 
And thine eye shall not pity; life shall go for 
life, eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for 
hand, foot for foot." It sounds harsh; but 
when one thinks of the frightful role in the 
world's history played by lying informers, and 
of the absolute necessity of truthfulness in 
testimony if human justice is to be adminis- 

179 



180 THE TEN COMMANDMENTS 



tered, one cannot help admiring this sincere 
attempt to root out false witness. 

Every court of law is but a small organised 
division of the great tribunal of public opinion, 
that world-court to which a few weeks ago 
President Wilson referred for accurate assess- 
ment the conflicting protests of Belgians and 
Germans in the present war. And in this court 
every one of us is constantly at the bar, on 
the witness stand, and upon the bench; at the 
same time on trial, testifying and judging. 
Every expression of our opinion of other peo- 
ple is testimony, and must be as conscientiously 
given as the statements we are prepared to 
make under oath. 

The Bible is primarily interested in char- 
acter, and the decisions of this court of public 
opinion not only register but mould character. 
The name men give us is something to which 
instinctively we live up or down; few persons 
are very much better or worse than they are 
expected to be. Zacchaeus was labelled grasp- 
ing and dishonest by his fellow-townsmen in 
Jericho, and he fulfilled their anticipations ; he 
was treated as a son of Abraham by Jesus, 
and responded to that faith. To injure a man's 



THE NINTH COMMANDMENT 181 



reputation is to rob him not only of his posi- 
tion in the minds of others, but of his own 
stimulus to well-doing. 

And further every witness before this court 
is himself on trial, and his evidence concern- 
ing others is a verdict which he passes upon 
himself. What we see in men, what we draw 
out of them, what we say of them, is a very 
telling indication of what we are. The 
thoughts we cherish and the words we utter 
are all the while making us, so that our wit- 
ness about others affects not them only, but 
ourselves. 

No wonder, then, that the Bible takes up 
this question of our talk about one another 
time and again in the most specific and definite 
ways. One psalmist asks the question, Who 
shall dwell with God? and answers among 
other things, "He that slander eth not with his 
tongue." Just before he has said, "He that 
speaketh truth in his heart," so that right 
thoughts and feelings, as well as just words 
about others are in his mind. Slander, in the 
New Testament, goes by the suggestive Greek 
word, "back-biting" ; it consists in saying about 
others what one dares not say to them. Di- 



182 THE TEN COMMANDMENTS 



ogenes, being asked what bit sorest, answered 
"Of wildbeasts the back-biter, of tame the 
flatterer." Slander and flattery go together; 
he who overpraises to one's face is likely to 
underrate out of earshot; both are forms of 
false witness against one's neighbour. 

And the Bible has much to say of that com- 
mon form of slander that we call gossip. One 
of the oldest codes enacts this law: "Thou 
shalt not go up and down as a talebearer 
among thy people." George Meredith has said 
that gossip is a beast of prey that does not 
wait for the death of the creature it devours. 
It is a very prevalent form of murder; there 
are many conversations like that reported in 
Pope's Rape of the Lock, where "at every 
word a reputation dies." Mrs. Grundy lives 
on from generation to generation; she is still 
the chief talker in most social meetings, be 
they conversations from the fire-escapes in 
tenements or in the most select drawing-rooms ; 
and she appears perhaps as frequently in 
trousers as in petticoats. Omit the personali- 
ties from the talk of most of us, and what 
would be left? The Book of Proverbs calls 
the gossip by the suggestive name of "the whis- 



THE NINTH COMMANDMENT 183 



perer." His words are "dainty morsels," for 
men find them appetising; and though they 
are "soft" (for the Hebrew word for "dainty" 
means "soft"), they have a most penetrating 
way of getting into the very centre of our 
minds where they lodge — "they go down into 
the innermost parts." 

It takes two both to gossip and to flatter, 
and the listener is as culpable as the talker. 
"Take heed how ye hear," said Jesus. We 
often blame other men's tongues when the con- 
demnation belongs equally to our own ears. 
We get what we are interested in when we con- 
verse, or we soon find a way of stopping or 
changing the conversation. What others think 
of saying to us is a fairly accurate measure 
of the impression we have made upon them. 
Most of us are greedy for praise, and clumsily 
or deftly (for skill in the art varies) fish for 
compliments, and draw men on to false wit- 
ness. 



The wisest of the wise 
Listen to pretty lies, 
And love to hear 'em told. 
Doubt not that Solomon 



184 THE TEN COMMANDMENTS 



Listened to many a one, 

Some in his youth, and more when he grew old. 

If people gossip to us, let us search and try 
our hearts. It takes no skill to show when 
one is bored; and if gossip and flattery do not 
bore us, we are radically diseased and need 
nothing less than a new heart and a right 
spirit. 

It is surprising how many of us fall into 
the habit of "running down" other people. It 
is a cheap and easy way of ministering to our 
own vanity. To belittle others seems relatively 
to exalt us. Most of us are aware of being 
inconspicuous nobodies; we know that we are 
very little people — pigmies in ability and puny 
in character. It is a hard and painful process 
to force ourselves to grow; it is much simpler 
to attempt to reduce others to our dimensions ; 
and we do it all the time. If someone is being 
heartily praised, we break in with our "Yes, 
but — ." The weak spots in others have a 
fatal fascination for us; our eyes are glued to 
them. Of the whole Achilles we notice only 
the heel. Tennyson has sketched the typical 
"runner down" in Vivien, who contributed not 



THE NINTH COMMANDMENT 185 



a little to the breaking up of the Round Table. 
She 

"let her tongue 

Rage like a fire among the noblest names. 
Polluting and imputing her whole self, 
Defaming and defacing till she left 
Not even Lancelot brave nor Galahad clean." 



One of the most difficult clauses for most of 
us in the Thirteenth Chapter of First Corin- 
thians runs: "Love thinketh," that is "impu- 
teth no evil." 

Another phase of false witness against which 
the Bible warns is connected with controversy. 
The Book of Proverbs again and again links 
a fool with contention. It seems to be next 
to impossible to disagree with others and do 
justice to them. The mere fact that they dif- 
fer from us argues to our conceit that there 
must be something wrong either with their 
brains or their consciences, or oftener with 
both. It is very rare that a serious difference 
of opinion does not bring with it personal de- 
preciation. Think of those whose views we do 
not like, and how many of them do we hon- 
estly admire? And particularly when our own 



186 THE TEN COMMANDMENTS 



reasoning is not very strong, we find ourselves 
tempted to disparage our opponents. Rich- 
ard Hooker, who in the midst of a contentious 
age won for himself the adjective, "the judi- 
cious Hooker," in replying to one of his dis- 
putants says: "Your next argument consists 
of railing and of reason; to your railing I say 
nothing; to your reasons I say what follows." 
And on another occasion he made the state- 
ment: "There will come a time when three 
words uttered with charity and meekness shall 
receive a more blessed reward than three thou- 
sand volumes written with disdainful sharp- 
ness of wit." How seldom one picks up a 
pamphlet or a newspaper article combating 
opinions which does not abuse those who hold 
them ! Sometimes the abuse is clever ; it makes 
the adversary appear ridiculous; but it is not 
just; it is false witness. After John Wesley 
had read a tract upon an interpretation of the 
astronomy in the early chapters of Genesis, 
he entered in his Journal: "Is it well thus to 
run down all that differ from us? Dr. Pye 
is an ingenious man, but so is Dr. Robinson 
also; so are twenty more, although they un- 
derstand Moses in a quite different manner." 



/ 



THE NINTH COMMANDMENT 187 



There must be controversies ; it is only through 
the friction of intellects that we light the torch 
of truth. Occasions occur when we have to 
contend with all our mental might for our 
convictions. But at such times we need to say 
to ourselves most emphatically: "Thou shalt 
not bear false witness against thy neighbour." 
We are bidden speak the truth in love ; and if 
we cannot speak it in love, we must keep silent. 
Truth spoken in any other way is uncon- 
vincing. 

The Bible cautions those whose sense of 
humour may lead them too far in playing with 
the truth about other people. "As a madman 
who casteth firebrands, arrows and death, so is 
the man that deceiveth his neighbour and saith, 
Am I not in sport?" Truth about men is so 
sacred that it is irreverent to trifle with it, 
exactly as we shrink from joking in the things 
we say about God. In the good stories which 
we tell concerning other people, we have to 
check ourselves and be sure that there is no 
malice in them. By no means all humour is 
entirely kind ; and while many men are helped 
by being laughed at, love, and only love, can 
laugh helpfully. 



188 THE TEN COMMANDMENTS 



And this brings us to Jesus' reinterpretation 
of this ancient commandment. "Judge not," 
He said, "that ye be not judged." In our more 
thoughtful moods it may seem strange that He 
had to say, "Judge not." There is scarcely 
anything which we men are less fitted to do. 
To the end the closest of us remain compara- 
tive strangers to each other. We know next 
to nothing of the real significance of the lives 
that are lived at our side. Some of you may 
have read the striking description Heine gives 
of the life of Immanuel Kant in the old city 
of Koenigsberg: "He lived an abstract, me- 
chanical, old-bachelor existence, in a quiet re- 
mote street. I do not believe that the great 
cathedral-clock of that city accomplished its 
day's work in a less passionate and more reg- 
ular way than its countryman, Immanuel Kant. 
Rising from bed, coffee-drinking, writing, lec- 
turing, eating, walking, everything had its 
fixed time; and the neighbours knew that it 
must be exactly half -past four when they saw 
Professor Kant in his grey coat, with his cane 
in his hand, step out of his house door, and 
move toward the little lime-tree avenue, which 
is named after him — the Professor's Walk. 



THE NINTH COMMANDMENT 189 



Eight times he walked up and down that walk 
at every season of the year, and when the 
weather was bad, or the grey clouds threatened 
rain, his servant, old Lampe, was seen anx- 
iously following him with a large umbrella 
under his arm, like an image of Providence. 
Strange contrast between the outer life of the 
man and his world-destroying thought! Of a 
truth, if the citizens of Koenigsberg had had 
any inkling of that thought they would have 
shuddered before him as before an executioner. 
But the good people saw nothing in him but a 
professor of philosophy, and when he passed 
at the appointed hour they gave him friendly 
greetings — and set their watches." And we 
know as little of the inner life of those of 
whom day after day we catch sight and form 
our superficial judgments. 

Jesus was not forbidding such superficial 
judgments. He knew that so long as men live 
together they must form opinions of one an- 
other. We have to "size up" men's abilities, 
dispositions, trustworthiness, in connection 
with the positions they fill. We have to esti- 
mate their value as friends. We have to make 
up our minds how they will feel or think about 



190 THE TEN COMMANDMENTS 



this, that or the other matter, in which we have 
dealings with them. Life is a constant series 
of such judgments. Jesus judged the men 
whom he chose to be His followers; and the 
amazing thing is that He valued them so 
highly. Recall His expectations of Simon 
Peter — "on this rock"; of James and John — 
"the cup that I drink, ye shall drink"; even 
of Judas Iscariot, for we have every reason to 
suppose that he, too, was selected in the faith 
that he would be loyal. "Love believeth all 
things, hopeth all things." And when Jesus 
said, "Judge not," He was speaking to would- 
be good men, and warning them against what 
is perhaps the commonest and worst fault of 
good people — allowing themselves to become 
censorious and to undervalue men and women. 

A sincerely good man, whose long public 
life constantly forced him to form judgments 
of other men — Mr. Gladstone — once wrote: 
"Nothing grows upon me so much with 
lengthening life as the sense of the difficulties, 
or rather the impossibilities, with which we 
are beset whenever we attempt to take to our- 
selves the functions of the Eternal Judge (ex- 
cept in reference to ourselves where judg- 



THE NINTH COMMANDMENT 191 



ment is committed to us ) , and to form any ac- 
curate idea of relative merit and demerit, good 
and evil, in actions. The shades of the rain- 
bow are not so nice, and the sands of the sea- 
shore are not such a multitude, as are all the 
subtle, shifting, blending, forms of thought and 
of circumstance that go to determine the char- 
acter of us and our acts." And he adds, "But 
there is One that seeth plainly and judgeth 
righteously." The difficulty is that we are all 
the while usurping God's place, and passing 
judgments on those whom we are not called 
on to justify or condemn. Any unnecessary 
expressions of opinion about other people are 
to be avoided as perilous infringements on 
God's prerogative. 

And it is here that good people are so often 
very far from good. Maurice once wrote to 
his mother: "Of all spirits I believe the spirit 
of judging is the worst, and it has had the rule 
of me I cannot tell you how dreadfully and 
how long. Looking in other people for the 
faults which I had a secret consciousness were 
in myself, where I should have been sure to 
find them all; this, I find, has more hindered 
my progress in love and gentleness and 



192 THE TEN COMMANDMENTS 



sympathy than all things else. I never knew 
what the words 'Judge not that ye be not 
judged' meant before; now they seem to me 
some of the most awful, necessary and beauti- 
ful in the whole Word of God." A recent 
novelist has described one of her characters as 
follows: "Discrimination was the note of her 
being. For every Christian some Christian 
precepts are obsolete. For Lady Lucy that 
which runs, 'Judge not,' had never been alive." 

And when circumstances compel us to form 
and express judgments about other people, we 
must clearly recall that in our limited human 
way we are attempting one of God's functions, 
and must remind ourselves how our Father 
judges. In Luke's account of Jesus' words the 
sequence runs: "Be ye merciful even as your 
Father is merciful. And judge not." The 
critical attitude is essentially ungodlike. It is 
worth remembering that so keen an analyst of 
character as Shakespeare puts upon the lips of 
his worst villain, Iago, the sentence: "I am 
nothing if not critical." And the only cure for 
the critical spirit is a very large dose of love. 
We have to discriminate or we have no taste, 
but it must be love's discrimination. Landor 



THE NINTH COMMANDMENT 193 



once, repenting of some censures he had passed 
on Milton, said to Southey, "Are we not some- 
what like two little beggar-boys who, forget- 
ting that they are in tatters, sit noticing a few 
stains and rents in their father's raiment?" 
"But," replied Southey, "they love him" And 
love qualifies us, as it qualifies our God, for 
judging, where we must judge. "Nothing," 
says Faber, the hymn-writer and good phy- 
sician of souls, "deepens the mind so much as 
the habit of charity. Charity cannot feed on 
surfaces. Its instinct always is to go deeper. 
Roots are its natural food." 

And this explains why Jesus added : "Judge 
not, and ye shall not be judged." It is not 
that God in an arbitrary fashion will pay us 
for being charitable in our opinions with an 
equal charitableness in judging us; but that 
the constant use of love in our estimates of 
others will actually alter us, deepen our na- 
tures, broaden our sympathies, feed us with di- 
vine impulses, and develop in us godlike char- 
acters that cannot be condemned. "With what 
measure ye mete, it shall be measured to you 
again," because the measure we use becomes 
our capacity, and God is always giving us just 



194 THE TEN COMMANDMENTS 



as much as we can contain. To be generous 
in our opinions of others is to enlarge our own 
natures to receive the generosity of God; to 
forgive is to have room for the inflow of His 
forgiveness, to judge with His love is to be 
capable of taking in His fulness and becoming 
like Him who cannot be harshly judged. 

Then Jesus adds the saying about first 
casting out the beam from our own eye before 
we can look at the mote in our brother's eye. 
In other words, be strict with yourself and 
you will be lenient in your judgment of others. 
Most critical persons are hypocritical; they 
overrate themselves and then underrate others. 
There is a very deceptive modesty that takes 
the form of running ourselves down in our 
talk with others in order to have them exalt 
us in reply, and tickle our vanity. All talk 
about our own merit or demerit, save to God, 
is probably to be avoided; but that does not 
mean that we are not to take ourselves in hand 
and give ourselves a rigid and searching 
scrutiny. "Why considerest not thou the beam 
that is in thine own eye?" said Jesus. It is to 
be carefully considered, scanned, hated, cast 
out, however painful the operation of re- 



THE NINTH COMMANDMENT 195 



moval is. Severity with self is the only safe- 
guard of love with others. 

And there is still one other enlargement of 
the meaning of this ancient commandment 
which we owe to Jesus. Who is the "neigh- 
bour" against whom we are forbid to bear false 
witness ? Jesus called "neighbour" anyone who 
needed what He had to bestow. It is always 
easier to undervalue those we have never 
seen than those who are close at hand. The 
death of a thousand soldiers in Poland or at 
Tsing Tao means less to us than a single life 
lost on our own subway. Our valuations vary 
inversely with the distance of the person we 
are valuing. We feel pained that some relative 
or friend is without the stimulus of our Chris- 
tian faith; we sometimes feel that a Chinaman 
or a Hindu can get on with religious inspira- 
tions considerably less. It is the commonest 
thing to hear nominal Christians declaring that 
other faiths (of which usually they know very 
little) are quite good enough for the inhabi- 
tants of Asia or Africa, while they consider 
the faith of Christ none too good for them and 

theirs. It is a pathetic form of bearing false 
witness against our neighbour. What does 



196 THE TEN COMMANDMENTS 



Christ, sincerely accepted, make out of even 
semi-civilised men in a single generation? 
What are the results of Christianity in the 
second and third generations? Let us be just. 
We have no occasion to depreciate the religious 
and moral inspirations given by other faiths; 
we are not likely to overestimate the worth 
of such unused Christianity as permits its 
nominal devotees to slaughter each other; but 
we must not be unfair in our judgments of 
the capacities of races as yet unchristianized ; 
and above all we must not be unjust to the 
transforming influence of Him, whom we call 
our Saviour. What are other men to us Chris- 
tians — men at our side, men in the ends of the 
earth? Brethren, for whose sake Christ died. 
What is Christ to us? Each must answer out 
of his own experience. Not to believe that all 
men are capable of attaining sonship with God 
through Him, and that He is able to supply 
their every need out of His fulness, is the 
most serious and most thoroughly unchristian 
form of bearing false witness against both our 
earthly and our Heavenly neighbour. 



THE TENTH COMMANDMENT 



THE TENTH COMMANDMENT 



Exodus xx:17: "Thou shalt not covet anything that 
is thy neighbour's " 

The Ten Commandments are represented as 
spoken at Sinai to tribesmen on the point of 
invading the land of Canaan and capturing the 
towns, vineyards and possessions of its inhab- 
itants. One wonders that it never occurred to 
any of them that this injunction, "Thou shalt 
not covet," had an immediate application to 
their greedy desire to expropriate the Canaan- 
ites. A Hebrew would have answered 
promptly that the dwellers in Canaan were not 
neighbours; only fellow-Israelites were neigh- 
bours. But unhappily, Christians, to whom in 
theory all men are neighbours, have not felt 
that this commandment forbade a nation cov- 
eting the territory, or trade, or prestige of an- 
other. Some "place in the sun" which is occu- 
pied by a neighbour people has been and still 
is the underlying motive that sends a nation 
to war. So universally has a stronger people 

199 



200 THE TEN COMMANDMENTS 



dispossessed a weaker, a civilised nation used 
its superior intelligence and improved appli- 
ances of fighting to seize the lands of a less civ- 
ilised, a vigorous race mastered a decadent or 
backward race, that we are at a loss to fancy 
how otherwise the world's history might have 
run its course. Coveting has been taken for 
granted; it has been labelled national ambi- 
tion, and held up as part of the creed of every 
patriot. It has been assumed that a country 
was justified in wanting and in taking every 
square inch of the earth's surface over which 
it could plant its flag. Whatever may be said 
to condone the actions of the past, the awak- 
ened conscience of to-day will surely insist 
that a land, be it the Philippines, or India, or 
Korea, or Belgium, or Bohemia, or Poland, or 
any other country with a national conscious- 
ness, belongs to its own inhabitants. It may 
not yet be ready to keep itself unhelped, but 
it must not be held by another land against 
its own will and used for another's interest. 
Only as this ancient commandment, "Thou 
shalt not covet anything that is thy neigh- 
bour's" is graven on the hearts of nations have 
we a lasting basis for peace. No patriotism 



THE TENTH COMMANDMENT 201 



without it is Christian, or, for that matter, even 
truly Jewish, according to an international 
application of the Decalogue. No satisfactory 
world-tribunal will be erected to adjudicate 
the differences of nations until the social 
conscience of the represented powers feels 
the imperative of this ancient moral prin- 
ciple. 

While the Israelites did not apply this com- 
mandment to their dealings with other peoples, 
the Bible is full of instances of individuals 
who are censured for breaking it — Achan with 
the Babylonish mantle, the shekels of silver 
and the wedge of gold among the booty of 
Jericho, David with Bethsheba, the wife of 
Uriah the Hittite, Ahab with Naboth's vine- 
yard, and a host more. But it leaves us to 
define for ourselves what coveting is forbid- 
den. "Covet earnestly," it bids us, "the best 
gifts." How shall we distinguish the two » 
kinds of coveting — self-seeking from laudable i 
ambition? 

This commandment has been used to stifle 
social restlessness. It has been interpreted to 
mean that a man must be content with what he 
and his already possess; they are not to de- 



202 THE TEN COMMANDMENTS 



sire the advantages and comforts of the more 
fortunately circumstanced. This is a very 
convenient application for the "haves," but 
hardly satisfactory to the "have-nots." We 
must recall that the Bible regards everything 
as primarily family property, and that the in- 
dividual's ownership is conditioned upon the 
judgment of the family that he renders a com- 
mensurate service, or that he needs his por- 
tion for his good. One may rightly covet for 
the disinherited a larger share in the house- 
hold's goods, and for some of the wealthy a 
fuller bearing of the household's burdens. 
Such social coveting is nothing but love. But 
the personal desire of some individual to take 
from another that which he now owns and 
make it his own is never a worthy aim. No 
man is entitled to set up his private opinion 
that it would be better for him to have that 
which is now another man's, and better for 
the other man to be without it. These are 
social judgments, which the community, not in- 
dividuals, is entitled to pronounce. What 
any man lawfully holds, he holds from the 
community under God ; if the community takes 
it from him — well and good; if some private 



THE TENTH COMMANDMENT 203 



person casts longing eyes upon it and wants 
it for himself, that is coveting a neighbour's 
possessions. 

And the Bible shows us in a hundred ways 
how readily men set their hearts on that which 
is another's, and how by so doing we degrade 
ourselves. Time and again it links covetous- 
ness with uncleanness. In the commandment 
itself wanting a neighbour's house or ox is set 
side by side with wanting his wife. We con- 
demn the foul desire of the would-be adul- 
terer; and the Bible tries to make us feel the 
foulness of all desires for that which belongs 
to others. 

St. Paul's letters repeatedly contain lists 
that run: 4 'Fornication, uncleanness, passion, 
evil desire, and covetousness;" "no fornicator, 
nor unclean person, nor covetous man." There 
is a genuine kinship between these vices. In 
the chronology of morals it often happens that 
the licentious young man becomes in middle 
age the money lover; covetousness has been 
called "promoted vice, lust superannuated." 
The desire to possess and enjoy what is an- 
other's is the same dirty desire whether its 
object be another man's wife, or his posi- 



204 THE TEN COMMANDMENTS 



tion, his fortune, his reputation, his busi- 
ness. 

And it is here that competition is most 
clearly seen as an immoral motive. Men may 
vie with each other for business efficiency; 
that is coveting earnestly the best gifts. 
Rivalry between workmen as to who can do 
the better job, or finish it more rapidly, is an 
entirely legitimate and praiseworthy rivalry. 
Firms may contend in the endeavour to render 
the community better service, and that is love's 
contest. But the moment a workman deliber- 
ately sets out so to fulfil his work that he 
supplants some other workman, or a firm con- 
sciously attempts to get the customers of an- 
other firm, unclean covetousness enters and de- 
grades the motive. In commercial competi- 
tion the Christian must distinguish sharply 
between coveting the best gifts with which to 
serve and coveting that which is a neighbour's. 

The great painters and poets have confirmed 
the Bible's feeling that covetousness is un- 
clean. Giotto, for instance, paints Envy as a 
figure of a woman partially bestialised with 
fingers terminating in claws ; and in the Faerie 
Queene Spenser tells how 



THE TENTH COMMANDMENT 205 



"Malicious Envy rode 

Upon a ravenous wolfe, and still did chaw 
Between his cankered teeth a venomous tode, 
That all the poison ran about his jaw. 
All in a kirtle of discolored say (serge) 
He clothed was, ypainted full of eies, 
And in his bosom secretely there lay 
An hateful snake, the which his tail uptyes 
In many folds, and mortal sting implyes." 

There is something essentially sub-human in 
setting longing eyes on that which is somebody 
else's ; it is brute-like to do that. 

This commandment is the climax of the law ; 
it goes deeper than any of the other com- 
mandments. Jesus had to take some of the 
others and deepen them for His disciples in 
order that they might feel that a hateful feel- 
ing was murder and a lustful thought adultery ; 
but He did not need to touch this command- 
ment. It went down of itself into men's secret 
thoughts and feelings; they might refrain from 
theft or uncleanness; but if the covetous de- 
sire was there, they were condemned. "Thou 
shalt not covet anything that is thy neigh- 
bour's" is simply the negative of "thou shalt 
love thy neighbour as thyself." 

And it was the searching character of this 



206 THE TEN COMMANDMENTS 



commandment that made it play a significant 
role in one of the greatest religious experiences 
in the Bible. Saul of Tarsus, the devout boy, 
brought up in the strict faith and morals of 
his fathers, and surpassing his fellow students 
in Gamaliel's classroom in earnestness, could 
listen to all the other nine commandments 
with his withers unwrung; but the tenth 
probed far into his conscience and left him 
writhing. "The law said, 'Thou shalt not 
covet,' " he tells us in a frank chapter of auto- 
biography, "and sin wrought in me all manner 
\|of coveting." One cannot help wishing that 
he had not been so general, but had drawn 
aside the veil of reticence and told us specifi- 
cally what he longed after. It is not likely 
to have been money, for his chosen career was 
not that of a wealth-seeker ; but money can do 
so many fine things that Saul may have wished 
for a fortune. It may have been sensual pas- 
sion ; and this will account for his strong words 
about buffeting his body and keeping it under. 
There is a crater of emotion in this man that 
becomes active in his Christian days in glow- 
ing devotion and fiery indignation ; and it may 
easily have been volcanic with other passions 



THE TENTH COMMANDMENT 207 



at an earlier period. Or it may have been the 
much more spiritual lust for reputation and in- 
fluence and power. Pride and coveting are ' 
close kin ; and this brilliant student with great 
gifts of leadership and utterance must have 
had no small battle with self-conceit and the 
desire to be in the prominent places held by 
others. Perhaps his phrase, "all manner of 
coveting," is meant to cover his desire always to 
be in the first place of recognition and praise 
and influence, and the jealous chafing of his 
spirit when others were more thought of and 
spoken about and followed. And it was his 
inability to cope with covetousness that ship- 
wrecked his sincere attempt to work out his 
own righteousness. He thought he was rea- 
sonably successful with the other command- 
ments ; but with his own feelings, longings, am- 
bitions, he could do nothing. "When the com- 
mandment came, sin revived, and I died." 

How thankful we must ever be for this 
honest man's confession of his mastering diffi- 
culty! How close he comes to us all! "All 
inanner of coveting" — let conscience work for 
a moment" and recall how we craved the ad- 
miring words spoken to another, and envied 



208 THE TEN COMMANDMENTS 



his charm, his ability, his capacity for evoking 
affection; how we set our heart on the com- 
forts, or the social prestige, or the personal 
popularity we saw someone else enjoying, and 
begrudged them to him in our selfish wish to 
have them for ourselves ; how we have actually 
schemed to get ahead of another in a friend's 
trust or esteem, in an official position, in a 
lucrative opportunity. There is hardly a busi- 
ness office that does not witness coveting — 
one man wishing himself in another's shoes; 
or a home that does not see a covetous love 
wishing its dear ones to outdistance in favour 
or power some other's beloved; or a meet- 
ing where a covetous desire to outshine an- 
other is not evident in the course of one or a 
dozen persons present; or a social entertain- 
ment that does not display a covetous craving 
for attention or applause or honour. "All man- 
ner of coveting" — one need not specify, for 
conscience will itemise the details for every 
one of us. There is always someone suffi- 
ciently near us in ability or social position or 
similarity of gifts to constitute him a rival, 
and provoke the green-eyed monster within us. 
"Sin revived, and I died." 



THE TENTH COMMANDMENT 209 



And to Paul in his extremity came One 
whose outstanding distinction lay in having no 
place whatsoever for covetousness, One who 
was. self-emptied; and in trustful loyalty to 
Him Paul became alive. But he hardly knew 
himself; it was not he that lived; he could 
not recognise himself with covetousness no 
longer dominant ; it was the uncoveting Christ 
alive in him. 

Although so free from personal desires that, 
as one sympathetic interpreter tells us, the 
Prince of this world found nothing in Him, 
Jesus knew the perils of acquisitiveness in His 
brethren. What a man wants, He felt, he 
serves. He saw men wanting money, want- 
ing it no doubt for a great many mixed mo- 
tives, lofty and base, just as men want it to- 
day; and that desire made them in His eyes 
worshippers of mammon. With fine power of 
analysis He unbared the subtle results that fol- 
lowed in character: a hardening, for a suc- 
cessful money-maker has to suppress his finer 
sympathies, and the result is a Dives living 
sumptuously while a Lazarus, neglected, lies 
not far away; a self-sufficiency, for money can 
do so many things that its possessors uncon- 



210 THE TEN COMMANDMENTS 



sciously settle down with a comfortable sense 
of security — "Soul, thou hast much goods laid 
up for many years;" a self-indulgence, because 
even the most generous of well-to-do persons 
has an almost overwhelming temptation to be 
kind to himself, what would be luxury in 
others appears ordinary avoidance of mean- 
ness in him, and everything in men's expecta- 
tion says to him: "take thine ease, eat, drink, 
and be merry." "How hardly shall they that 
have riches," said the frankest and most plain- 
spoken of masters, "enter the Kingdom of 
heaven." Fine as may be the aims to which we 
would put wealth, its possessor must realise 
that he owns perilous stuff ; in a thousand ways 
it may ruin him. And to long for money, high 
as is the purpose in which we wish to employ 
it, is a most dangerous longing. "The love of 
money is the root of all kinds of evil," says 
the truest interpreter of the Lord's mind. 

But it is also just to remember that while 
Jesus spoke of money as unrighteous mam- 
mon, — "unrighteous", perhaps, because in a 
world so unlovingly ordered as ours its acqui- 
sition and possession can hardly fail to be with- 
out injustice to someone, or because it is so 



THE TENTH COMMANDMENT 211 



likely to injure its owner — He also insisted 
that it had a very important moral bearing. "If, 
therefore, ye have not been faithful in the un- 
righteous mammon, who will commit to your 
trust the true riches?" The proper handling 
of money is an essential part of man's educa- 
tion. Sir Henry Taylor, in his Notes on Life, 
has written: "So manifold are the bearings 
of money upon the lives and characters of man- 
kind, that an insight which should search out 
the life of a man in his pecuniary relations 
would penetrate into almost every cranny of 
his nature. He who knows, like St. Paul, how 
to spare and how to abound, has a great knowl- 
edge; for if we take account of all the virtues 
with which money is mixed up — honesty, jus- 
tice, generosity, charity, frugality, forethought, 
self-sacrifice, and of their correlative vices, 
it is a knowledge which goes near to cover the 
length and breadth of humanity, and a right 
measure in getting, saving, spending, giving, 
taking, lending, borrowing, and bequeathing, 
would almost argue a perfect man." Small 
wonder, then, that in Jesus' judgment a right 
handling of money is a conclusive test of fit- 
ness for the possession of true riches. 



212 THE TEN COMMANDMENTS 



And in Jesus' mind this Tenth Command- 
ment was indissolubly connected with the First, 
so that the Decalogue for Him began and 
ended on the same note. A man whose heart 
was set on acquiring wealth, no matter what 
lofty purpose he had in mind for it, was put- 
ting another god up beside the living Father 
on the throne of his life. He was giving some- 
thing else a consideration, a trust, a service, 
that belonged to God alone. "Ye cannot serve 
God and mammon." And in entire accord 
with the Master, Paul constantly calls a cov- 
etous man an idolater. 

We are back, then, where we started — to 
Luther's definition of what it means to have 
a God: "Whatever thy heart clings to and 
relies on, that is properly thy God." Our 
danger lies in putting things or people in God's 
place, longing for and pinning our faith to 
something less than the Most High. We have 
to remind ourselves again and again how 
meagre was the outfit of Jesus — He had prac- 
tically nothing but a conviction and a c harac- 
ter; and how entirely sufficient that outfiT 
proved. To be sure He did not hesitate to 
employ everything that happened to be at His 



THE TENTH COMMANDMENT 213 



disposal, but He was always detached from 
it; His heart was never set on it as indispen- 
sable. If someone invited Him to a banquet 
He accepted, and enjoyed so heartily what 
was offered Him that critics called Him glut- 
tonous and winebibber. If art could make 
His message carry, He took pains to be su- 
premely artistic, and clothed His thought in 
phrases of undying beauty. If the affection 
and loyalty of men could further His cause, 
He used to the full the friendship of a Peter, 
an Andrew, a John. But He longed for noth- 
ing as essential to His purpose and life. If 
men's hospitality turned to rejection and the 
tragic prosecution of the last days, if He could 
no longer get a hearing for His most beautiful 
parable and was reduced to silence, if one 
disciple turned traitor and the rest ran away, 
there was no diminution in His confidence, no 
regretful longing for other means to accom- 
plish His end, but complete contentment with 
the stern and awful necessity of enduring the 
cross. If He had the righteous and loving God, 
that seemed to fill His every need. The only 
covetous cry was the prayer for Him: "My 
God, My God, why hast Thou forsaken Me?" 



214 THE TEN COMMANDMENTS 



"Ye cannot serve God and . . ." To have 
God means that God has all of us. Coveting 
anything apart from Him is to lose Him. 
Honesty compels most of us to admit that we 
are not conscious, as Jesus was, of this most 
real reinforcement of ourselves from outside. 
God is to us an idea rather than a factor, a 
force. Jesus would tell us that covetousness, 
a divided heart, doomed us to spiritual numb- 
ness and rendered God beyond our feeling. 
We want the righteous God, and at the same 
time we want our own way; we want our 
Father's "well done", and we want to stand in 
with our neighbours ; we want to do His will, 
and we want to get on in the world ; we want 
to spend and be spent for the Kingdom, and 
we want to be reasonably comfortable and 
amused while we are doing it. James would 
call us "double-minded," and Jesus would 
explain the doubleness by two deities — God 
and mammon. 

If we covet God, He must be coveted with 
our entire natures in order to be had. There 
can be no side desires; the whole current of 
our being must set just one way. An occa- 
sional wistfulness for higher things, a stray 



THE TENTH COMMANDMENT 215 



trust in love, a partial resolve to seek right- 
eousness, a fitful aspiration for justice, a 
thought once in a while of the will of the Most 
High — these will never give us God. 

Night sucks them down, the tribute of the pit, 
Whose names, half-entered in the book of life, 
Were God's desire at noon. 

"Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with aZZ" 
or there is some undevoted particle of the self 
coveting somewhat discordant with God, who 
is love; and that is idolatry. To give one's 
whole self to Him with the completeness of 
Jesus' consecration is so to find God, and to 
be satisfied in Him, that there is no fractional 
longing left to covet aught unrelated with His 
will. God is all in all. "Whom have I in 
heaven but Thee? And there is none upon 
earth I desire besides Thee." 

But this is only to face ourselves with the 
problem that baffled Saul of Tarsus. How is 
it in our power to concentrate our love and 
leave no fractional desires straying off on 
unhallowed ends? Jesus Christ proved the 
solution of Saul's problem. After the spell of 
His mastering Personality had been cast over 



216 THE TEN COMMANDMENTS 



him, Paul said, "One thing I do," "To me to 
live is Christ." God, when He comes to us 
through the Figure of Jesus, claims and cap- 
tures as much as in us is. Jesus engrosses a 
whole man, fills the entire horizon. We covet 
His life with God, His life with men, His gifts. 
And we are so covetous of Him that we covet 
nothing else. 

Our safety from all other coveting lies in 
constantly looking off to Him, and letting 
Him draw out our every desire and confidence 
and fasten them on Himself. 

"Thou, O Christ, art all I want; 
More than all in Thee I find." 

Then God through Him possesses us entirely, 
and we seek Him with our whole hearts, and 
find Him. "The Lord is my portion, saith my 
soul"; "I have no good beyond Thee." 




33 



Deacidified using the Bookkeeper process. 
Neutralizing agent: Magnesium Oxide 
Treatment Date: Nov. 2005 

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